Kantor said:
Which is exactly why the PS3 and 360 versions would not outsell the Wii version, which is what I've been saying from the beginning. Of course, even if the PS3 and 360 versions ended up with 500k each, and the Wii version had 300k, the HD versions would be a failure, because they were heavily hyped and did not deliver, while the Wii version would be niche, and would have sold better than expected. I'm not calling MadWorld a failure, but...come on, some people think Resistance 2 is a failure with 1.56 million sales, and some crazy people think LBP is a failure with 2 million. If those two are failures, how can a game selling 170k copies (granted, it's only been out a few weeks, but both games had around 650k by that point) on a console with a far larger userbase be considered a success? |
Why does the userbase matter? Was God of War 2 a failure because it sold to 1% of the PS2's userbase?
Why should their be one metric of success? Should a low budget unadvertized game have to sell as much as an amazingly large budget heavily advertized game to be considered successful?
Why do we have to judge a game's sales based off its first couple of weeks of sales? Should Brain Age for the DS be considered a failure because it didn't sell well initially?
Shouldn't people's expectations be taking into consideration when determining success? Games like Little Big Planet (for the most part) were expected to see sales in the 2 to 4 Million range, while MadWorld was (for the most part) expected to have sales in the 500,000 to 1 Million range
There are very few games that in style, theme or substance are similar to MadWorld that have seen particularly high sales, and for every gamer who is attracted to it there seems to be 10 who are repulsed by it aswell. I think Sega was well aware of this which is why the budget was so low (if you watch the credits it appears like there was only 20 to 30 full time developers) ... If it reaches a sales level of 500,000 it will probably be at a point where it was profitable or at least close to breaking even.
At the same time, a game like Resistence is very similar in style, theme and substance to most of the most successful games on the market today and there are countless games which are similar and sold amazingly well. It was one of Sony's showpeice games for the PS3 durring the holiday season, received heavy marketing, and was developed with a moderately large budget for a PS3 game. I would not be overly surprised if Sony needed 1 Million in sales to cover the development budget and 500,000 to 1 Million in sales to cover the marketing budget.
