This graphic is taken from Wired’s article The Settlers of Catan. Kind of a trivial complaint, but: I think it’s a bad chart.
It’s so obvious that it shows massive sales growth, with over 600,000 units in 02008… except that’s not what it’s showing at all. The label for the Y axis reads ‘Cumulative Unit Sales’, which means the data is actually a lot less dramatic than it seems. It’s solid growth year-over-year, but 150,000 units is rather less than 600,000. And the caption does nothing to clarify: ‘Released in 1995, The Settlers of Catan only recently caught fire in the U.S’.
So while the chart isn’t an outright lie — it wasn’t created by a marketing department, I’m assuming — the data could definitely have been presented in a more honest manner.
