Sony took to their PlayStation blog yesterday to congratulate Sucker Punch for Infamous: Second Son racking up a million copies sold just nine days after launch. While it’s no earth-shattering COD or GTA total, those numbers are quite good, and definitely the best in the series’ history.
The news got me thinking about the fate of the other big next-gen launch title released within the past month, Titanfall. How has the game sold since its much-anticipated launch?
Finding information about sales of the game isn’t easy, and is generally a lot of speculation and incomplete data. You won’t find Microsoft or EA blog posts boasting about sales milestones for Titanfall. Rather, you’ll see a loose collection of blogs content to guess at totals, and then VGChartz saying the game has sold 1.45M copies worldwide…as of two weeks ago…in retail stores, which is the only thing they can track.
It seems odd that given Titanfall’s high profile, more information hasn’t been released about sales of the game. I can’t imagine it’s sold poorly, and it’s certainly outsold Infamous. But here we have Sony tooting Infamous’s horn even though it likely didn’t match its Xbox One/PC rival. Between retail units and downloads, it seems like EA or Microsoft would want to express that yes, Titanfall is meeting or beating expectations, rather than being forced to do so at a quarterly financial briefing.
Infamous seems to be a case of a less-hyped game beating expectations both in terms of quality, fan engagement and sales. The game well-received among critics and PS4 owners, and sold better than past games. Though the game looked good, it really wasn’t all that heavily advertised, and yet, sales and praise.
Titanfall is proving to be a somewhat stranger case. It rolled in with a huge head of steam, and the review scores to match. But very shortly after release, the buzz seemed to fade abnormally quickly. Players tore through the game’s limited modes, wanted more, and there really wasn’t much else to do. The game is going to be patched and updated with much more content in the future, but so far, it doesn’t feel like the game has capitalized on the goodwill it had ahead of, and even during launch. If it put up blockbuster numbers I’d eat my words, but the fact that neither Microsoft, EA or Respawn seems to want to talk sales at all says that it may not have been the unequivocal home run they were hoping for. Perhaps they’ve found themselves in a Tomb Raider sold-millions-but-still-not-a-success trap which is an unfortunate byproduct of the massively expensive AAA game era.
“A huge congratulations goes out to the team over at Sucker Punch for creating such a wonderful game,” says Sony as they celebrate Infamous’ 1M sales. “A true testament to their passion as developers and commitment to their fans, and a great big thanks to all of you who have picked up the game and have shown us how you enjoy your powers.”
Titanfall has likely sold at least double Infamous’ 1M, but there’s been no official announcement to say that’s the case. This isn’t to say that all publishers are obligated to share private sales info, but for a game as seemingly important as Titanfall, it seems odd not to do so unless they thought the figures weren’t worthy of sharing.
Perhaps I’m wrong and some big “3 million sold!” announcement is right around the corner. But for now, congrats to Infamous on a job well done, and we’ll just have to assume Titanfall deserves the same sort of praise.
