consecutive months in Media Control's top 20. Anno 1602s global sales climbed to 2.7 million units by September 2004. In 2007, Jörg Langer wrote that the Pyramid edition alone had contributed roughly 750,000 sales to the game's lifetime total. Demographics According to Heiko Klinge of GameStar, a significant number of Anno buyers fell outside the standard demographic for German computer games. By 2000, Sunflowers noted a high "proportion of inexperienced players and women in the Anno fan base", which it attributed to the game's design goal of "play without stress". Klinge echoed this theory. Der Spiegel similarly reported Annos wide appeal among both casual and hardcore players, and the magazine's Carsten Görig argued that "many can agree on Anno because Anno is a phenomenon". Der Spiegels Richard Löwenstein cited Anno as an early computer game to draw female players; he claimed in 2002 that approximately 25% of its buyers were women. In 2011, Klinge likewise called the game's number of female players "an absolute novelty" before The Sims, and reported that women made up nearly 50% of Anno 1602 customers. Anno 1602s success was primarily contained to the German market; GameStar reported that, like Gothic, it failed to make an "international breakthrough". Sunflowers president Adi Boiko remarked: "When we wanted to distribute Anno 1602 internationally, we encountered enormous prejudices that a game from Germany couldn't be anything special". Of Anno 1602s 2.5 million worldwide sales by late 2002, the German market accounted for 1.7 million. The title's limited crossover in other markets was common among German games, particularly in Annos genre of construction and management, despite the outsize popularity of such titles in the German-speaking world. Der Spiegels Frank Patalong argued that games like Anno 1602 were a "specifically German phenomenon: nowhere else in the world are [these] simulations as successful as here at home". Stefan Schmitt of Der Spiegel and Jochen Gebauer of Games Aktuell wrote that such games were especially disliked in the United States, and a writer for GameStar stated that no Anno title had been a hit in that market by mid-2006. Boiko noted that it was "very difficult for us to find a good distributor" in the United States, which led to Anno 1602s delayed release and lack of marketing there. However, he was pleased with its 200,000 sales in the country by early 2002. This number rose to 250,000 units by that November. Reception