Michael Pachter, managing director of research for the Los Angeles-based Wedbush Morgan financial services firm has been popping up to speculate about videogames all over the place recently. And why not? Everybody is entitled to an opinion – even a financial services expert.

But where you’d expect him to have an opinion on RockStar’s share price (trans: stock price) or maybe the fate of EA’s CEO, instead he’s been making authoritative predictions for the likelihood of a Bully (trans: Canis Canem Edit) follow-up. He explained to Gamespolitics on January 4th that sales of the game “trailed off pretty dramatically in November” having sold – he assumed – 250,000 worldwide. He then guessed that the game “did not sell particularly well at holiday” with a guestimate of 150,000 sales worldwide in December.

He then expected Bully to sell 200,000 copies, “over the next few months and to disappear from the shelves” before paying off with:


But never let it be said that widely quoted managing directors of research for large financial services organisations can’t get the basic facts of the matter wrong. Sorry, we obviously meant to write, “can’t be a stand-up guy and admit to having been a little off the mark” – because today, Pachter tells the same website that “(Bully) sold over double my expectations in December”.

He then explains “…it is realistic to think a sequel could generate two million units in sales. That is generally suffucient to justify a sequel. I’m not competent to discuss whether it can be built using the GTA 4 engine, so it’s premature to guess how much a sequel would cost, but if the company thinks it can sell two million units of Bully 2, it will probably produce a sequel”, before signing off with, “Please make sure you print my apology to Take Two - I have been consistently wrong about this title.”

So, according to the people who obviously know about these things, there might – or might not – be a sequel to Bully at some point in the future if the current version sells enough units – and that, SPOnG readers, is why chaps like these get the big bucks. We’d suggest that you rush out now and sign up for some sort of economics qualification – you know it makes cents.