It seems players in North America could not wait to experience the third installment in the Mass Effect franchise, as the title is off to an excellent sales start in North America. While Electronic Arts has said they expected the title to do well, they were not expecting this type of response immediately.

EA has confirmed that the title was able to move 890,000 copies in North America in the first 24 hours, which puts it far ahead of what they anticipated. GameStop confirmed that more than 40% of buyers are purchasing a download code with their copy of Mass Effect 3 to add additional Day One DLC content.

With the excellent sales of Mass Effect 3 in North America comes word from some retailers in North America that they are already out of Mass Effect 3, and they are not sure when more copies will arrive. One retailer who is part of a smaller chain tells us, “I sold all of my pre-orders and the additional copies that I had set aside for walk-ins; and I have already received one additional shipment and sold out of those. I placed an order for more, only to be told that the warehouse is waiting for more copies to arrive, so there will be at least a small delay till I have more copies. This, of course, isn’t the news that I wanted to hear.”

EA is expecting Mass Effect 3 to do well for the company, as it is one of the key franchise releases this year. We should know more about European sales in the next couple of days; but initial projections from our sources suggest that EA could already be over 2 million units sold once all of the numbers from this past weekend are totaled up.