The Political Machine (the game) was released this past August and it sold quite well. It was published by Ubi Soft at retail and distributed electronically via TotalGaming.net.  But as a money maker, it was so-so.  That's because a game that retails for $20 that has only a few month life span is going to have a hard time making back its investment.  Luckily, The Political Machine made its money back.

But even if it hadn't made its money back, it was worth doing. In fact, it would have been worth doing even if it had only made a quarter as much money.  Why? Because during the months of August through November Stardock had a tremendous spike of overall sales. We're talking a spike of 40% in sales from our electronic store.  And when you're talking about an electronic store that does millions of dollars in sales each year, that's significant.

You see, the game itself generated so much coverage because of its topic that it brought hundreds of thousands of new people to our websites. And many of these people then purchased something else.  Some bought TotalGaming.net subscriptions. Some bought Object Desktop. And some bought a whole bunch of things.

After the election, sales returned back to where one would expect..well not quite, they have remained higher than projected ever since. But the lesson learned is that there's more to products than just their sales. Something the retail world has known for a long time.