Thread failure, PS2 Euro sales are missing, could be 2 million. Heard on 1up podcast the Carbon sales are +8 million.

Well , its true , the NFS games need a brand new killer title , like Underground was ... maybe NFS : Future ? :P

Your right Fonz.......EA needs to dump Wii and last-gen support and goto X360/PS3 exclusively.

The fact is, NFS is a game that caters to the "typical male gamer". It features fast cars, exotic locations (ish), cops, and lots of money. It's not a casual-bearing game, but goes to the middle-of-the-road.

Your not taking the entire NFS series in perspective, therefore your arguments are vastly flawed.

NFS UG and UG2 were made at the peak of last-generation. NFS:MW and C were made during the transitions from last-gen to now-gen. This always has collapsed the markets of many IPs. Madden is a great example - it's overall sales dropped pretty bad in 06 and 07, only to now have good sales on the X360/PS3 platforms now.

Having said this, Carbon really, really sucked. It was like NFS:MW without the good parts.

And having said this, you don't have all the Carbon data, just the 1m sellers in PS2/X360, but no info for the other versions which sold decently outside of the US. I'd expect 2x sales from PAL regions.


Your trying to grasp at straws, mentioning declining IPs like MoH:A. The MOH series is rapidly declining because....There's nothing new in it. Thats why Pro Street is changing so much - and with the open-ended point to point races, it looks like it'll do really well.

I hate to say it but all sides of this argument are correct ...

EA was built off of releasing (moderately high quality) sequels to in-demand games in the N64/Playstation and PS2/XBox/Gamecube generations; every year you could go out and buy the Madden or Need For Speed game knowing that it was a good game that was worth the price. In a lot of ways you can equate EA with a chain resturant like Chillies or Boston Pizza, they're not the best thing in the world but you know what you're getting and for the price it isn't that bad.

The XBox 360 and PS3 throw a wrench in their whole strategy because (at least) twice as much work needs to be done in that same one year timeline in order to release your game on schedule; people who understand project management will not be surprised to learn that EA's games are now lower quality, less original and have far more bugs which makes the games sell far worse.

EA should (probably) cut back on several of its games (Medal of Honor, Need for Speed) and start releasing them every 18 to 24 months on the XBox 360, they should hire people who know how to implement interesting Wii controls (or who know how to copy other developers implementations) and focus on releasing higher quality Wii and PS2 games.

You can add another 2 million to the NFS carbon sales, considering the sales of NFS titles in E.U and the average decline seen since most wanted.
So that brings up the tally of NFS carbon to 6 million vs. 7.89 million for NFS MW and NFS Carbon would have cost at least 20-25% more considering the next gen assets created for the game.
If you look at the PS2 weekly h/w sales, there is a huge market to be exploited over there. Hardcore and Mature gamers have shifted over to the next gen consoles. Hence the great performance of M-rated games on nex-gen consoles.
But casual and teenage gamer find the budget for next gen gaming too exorbitant. Hence E-rated and Teen rated games will perform much better on the PS2, Wii and the Xbox (if MS had not pulled its lifeline).