HappySqurriel said:
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.
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Inequal ground, it seems. A game like House of the Dead or MadWorld wouldn't be expected to sell well, while Resistance 2 would be?
I'm going to pull up another example here: Killzone 2. 720,000 sales first week. That is not a failure, by any stretch. Even if Halo 3 did sell 4 million first week, Killzone 2 was never expected to sell Halo levels. However, a Call of Duty game, the sequel to CoD4, released in November, just before the holiday season, sold the same amount first week as Killzone 2 (on PS3). Thus, we have a fair barometer.
With MadWorld, we have pretty much nothing. How many games in this genre (on Wii) have been considered successful? Was No More Heroes a success? Well, we didn't know, because back then there was literally nothing to compare to. But, of course, on a console where Cooking Mama sells 1.2 million copies, how can a third of that be considered a success? People don't seem to realise that it's the genre, not the game, that doesn't sell on Wii.
This shows that MadWorld is tracking alongside House of the Dead: Overkill, and above No More Heroes. It could reach 500,000, easily. But for a game with such ridiculous levels of (I hate saying this) hype, a game that was Most Wanted number one for its month, is 500,000 really successful? It's not a flop, but is Zack and Wiki successful?
I'm pretty certain that Resistance 2 will end up with at least 3 million sales. That's a hefty profit. It's not a failure, because it is actually selling faster than Fall of Man ever did. Again, it was pretty hyped, at least as much as MadWorld, but for two games, with equal hype levels (not that hype has any bearing on sales), and for one to end up with 6 times the sales of the other, and for it to be considered a failure, when the other one is considered a success, is just plain ridiculous. Shooter or no shooter, hack and slash or no hack and slash.
So basically, neither of them are failures. But I would call Resistance 2 successful, while I would hesitate to do so for MadWorld...yes, it's niche, but 500,000 is 500,000.
(Former) Lead Moderator and (Eternal) VGC Detective 
