How well do the Conduit and Madworld have to do to send a message?

[The_vagabond7]

Snesboy said:
Geez, what is with all the MadWorld hate? I expect it to do as well as No More Heroes, which did pretty well in North America.

 

Eh, lets not oversell NMH success. It did less world wide than any Devil May Cry game did in the US alone.

Mad World is an odd bird to predict. It's an action beat 'em up. Every devil May Cry has sold well over a million. The old Onimusha games did the same. There's no doubt in my mind Bayonetta will cross the million mark handily. The art style in and of itself shouldn't handicap the game THAT terribly, especially with half decent advertising that plays it as a strength. Other than it being a wii game, what would prevent it from being a million seller? The answer hopefully is nothing. Because publishing companies aren't going to look at it doing 500k and say "Huge success given it's unorthodox art style!" If it only does 500-600k and does so in an agonizing crawl ala NMH then that's not going to impress anyone. Especially if Bayonetta manages to handily cross a million on HD consoles while it's struggling.

Marketing teams and publishers won't make excuses for low numbers. If they aren't impressive, they aren't impressive. Mad world has more hype than any other action game for Wii right now, so it had better perform or it's going to look bad. And furthermore it's part of a drive. A drive to push core games on wii. If it flounders, even if Conduit does over a million, that just means one FPS got over a million and can be thrown on the pile of others like Red Steel and MP3 that are viewed as outliers, exceptions rather than a rule. I think core games need momentum, a string of hits, rather than just one game that managed to do decent numbers. The only way I could see it being acceptable for it to do mediocre numbers is if Conduit does fantastic numbers, does 3-4 million and has a strong online base of players. But otherwise one FPS doing good but not astounding numbers isn't going to convince anyone.

I'm being optimistic in thinking it can do well. I'm putting faith in the wii core gamer. There is no reason Mad World should only do 500-600k while similar high profile beat 'em ups on other systems can easily cross a million. I'm crossing my fingers for this one.