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mrstickball on 07 September 2009
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MontanaHatchet said:

Who said anything about banning? Felt the need to bring that up for no reason? You're a mod, you're held to a higher standard. You know you shouldn't go to games you've never played and have no interest in and don't even like at all and make negative, unfounded comments about it. Of course, this doesn't matter to you. I'm not saying that we have no idea what the lifetime sales will be. Rather, I said that YOU have no idea what the lifetime sales will be. Apparently you think (or thought, because you can't keep one opinion together) that the game was a bomb after 14 weeks, even though it was well on its way to a million. I don't really think you can gauge sales trends from 6 weeks in either. For its first few weeks, Halo 3 was selling on the level of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. However, its lifetime sales look like they will be nowhere close. And even over a year after it came out, I don't think many people would have predicted just how much Halo 3 would sell. Considering how casual centric the market has become, and the sales trends of games on different platforms, most games require WAY MORE than 4-6 weeks. I bet that for every game that you could tell the lifetime sales of within 4-6 weeks, I could name a dozen counterexamples.

Prototype has sold 1.3 million between both systems, but that also comes with the costs of multiplatform development. Developing for the PS3, 360, and PC isn't cheap. In fact, it's absolutely, ridiculously expensive. It seems to be bankrupting a lot of developers. By the way, I hope you're not comparing my post to yours. Arguing profitability isn't trolling. Saying things like "ouch" and "bomba" is trolling, and you know better. Or maybe you don't. You're frankly just annoying. I never said that games cost more this generation to develop, I'm just saying that it really depends on the game. You can make a ballpark estimate of what certain games cost to make, but you can never make definitive statements to that point. For example, Shenmue was a last generation game, and cost like, what? 70 million to make? Gears of War came out this generation, has way better graphics and technology, and costs 10 million to make. I highly doubt that Sly Cooper costs anywhere near the same amount to make as inFamous, but I also think that in total sales, inFamous will come out on top. Heck, most developers aren't making anywhere near as much money as they did last generation. Just turning a profit seems to be nothing short of a miracle for most companies. However, inFamous looks to be doing more than that. The legs do look like they'll continue. It hasn't dropped with PS3 sales being sub-100k, so I'm sure it will do just fine in the coming weeks. Maybe it will drop below 15k, but I'm not expecting anything big. If it can keep up a similar level of sales even past its first 10 weeks, it's doing great. That's better than 90% of the HD games on the market, and it's a great sign for inFamous. Now, of course its sales have been dropping. Staying above 20k isn't easy when you're not a big HD title, or a game on the Wii or DS. However, you seem to be forgetting all about the GIGANTIC SHOPPING SEASON coming in about 2-3 months. This will boost the sales of all titles incredibly, but also those of inFamous. So no, it's not going to continue dropping. After Christmas time, it could easily be over a million. Then, when given the natural trend of sales (legs in 2010, another holiday season), it could inch to 1.5 million. Those are solid sales, and you can't argue that that is unprofitable. That's 90 million dollars in profit. Unless this game broke Sony's bank (or it's somewhere on the budget level of Killzone 2), that will suffice.

InFamous will have legs, because it has already shown that it has legs. I don't even know why you mentioned Sony fans. Sony fans aren't the definitive answer to everything, although I suppose you will take them as such because it furthers your own argument. Maybe I'll take the predictions of all 360 fanboys to make fun of 360 games. Why not? There seem to be enough wacky ones around here. inFamous isn't just a nice exclusive, it's a solid one. Selling nearly a million units is fantastic no matter what time frame it was done in. Which would you rather have: A game sell 2 million in a year or a game sell 1 million in half a year (the sales of both games being irrelevant past then)? Profits stack up over time, it's how companies like Nintendo and Ubisoft remain so successful. Caring about sales only in a small window of time is an outdated methodology that's fairly meaningless in the modern market. And why are you comparing this to some of these games? Seriously, did you just compare inFamous to Wii Fit? Do you have no dignity at all? Games like Wii Fit and Mario Kart are huge successes from Nintendo that have become kings of this generation, and the fact that you brought them up only gives me the opportunity to make fun of the 360. After all, Wii Fit and Mario Kart have certainly jogged and lapped past the biggest games on the 360 (which also have much higher budgets). I'm still laughing at the fact that you were so desperate as to bring up Mario Kart and Wii Fit to compare them to inFamous. Yes, we all know that Sony was expecting inFamous to be the new Wii Fit. Excuse me while I laugh at your expense. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. There, that's better.

Don't marketing expenses apply to a lot of games? I do remember a lot of advertisements for inFamous, but it depends on who you mean it will be profitable for. Sony handled the advertising, and they had billions to do it with. It likely didn't cost Sucker Punch a penny. So perhaps Sony might have lost money on the title. Sucker Punch, however, must have made a big profit on inFamous. By the way, where did you get the idea that inFamous and most other HD titles cost 20 million or more to make? I've read a lot (10 million, 13-14 million), but never something that high. Some games cost in that range (Heavenly Sword comes to mind), but a lot of those games were early titles or games with lots of cinematics. Now, you could claim that inFamous has a lot of cinematics, or you could claim it doesn't. I doubt you'd know anyways since it's obvious you've never played the game. Let's assume Sony and Sucker Punch only get 20 bucks per copy of inFamous sold, and the game sells 1.5 million lifetime (since that certainly looks possible). That's 30 million revenue, a pretty good buffer for a game that may have gone over a 20 million dollar budget. And that's all speculation, of course. On the other hand, I don't go around saying stupid things like a game being a bomb just because it didn't sell a certain amount of copies in a certain amount of time.

I'm glad you went back to the bomb quote, it will help you realize how absolutely stupid it was. inFamous sold nowhere near Crackdown when it launched. Now, if memory serves (I can't go to check while reading this post), Crackdown had a launch higher than 300k in the Americas. InFamous was never anywhere close to that, nor should you have ever thought it was. Crackdown sold well because a bunch of people wanted to play the Halo 3 demo (and to its credit, it was a great game, but the demo certainly helped). Vgchartz raised the sales of inFamous after NPD data was released, meaning the game sold even more than the starting data indicated. So, in other words, it was actually more of a success than it first appeared.

Your expectations aren't equal to those of Sony. Sucker Punch has never produced an amazingly big game, and I doubt Sony was expecting them to. Do you really think Sony expected the game to sell like Crackdown or 2 hyped up multiplatforms? Saint's Row came out at a time where there weren't a lot of big 360 games, and 360 fans bought every last big exclusive that came out. So yeah, maybe Saint's Row is a somewhat fair comparison. On the other hand, inFamous looks like it should end up in a similar level of sales (1.5-2 million), so it's not the biggest deal. So, we've got that Halo 3 beta game, or Prototype? I really doubt Sony thought inFamous was in the range of Prototype at all (by the way, forgot about the Prototype marketing?).

And the last paragraph you finally start to see the light, and for once, maybe, I can stop being depressed debating with you. But hey, I like you Stickball. You lose debates and you doesn't afraid of anything.

Montana,

Here's the issue. You feel that game sales can't be known after a given point of time, I disagree. We can do predictive analysis on games after  a few weeks to get an idea of the general sales trend for a game. I used it very often in the prediction league when it was first formed to very, very great effect. It helped me reach #2 for the entire year (2007), and I use it a lot for long-tail analysis in the game industry.

As for your comparison of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Halo 3, I do not believe you even bothered looking at the sales data before you stated both games sold similarly their first few weeks, but varied greatly in overall sales:

 

Halo 3 San Andreas Weekly Difference LTD Difference
 3,815,444           3,986,105                    (170,661)         (170,661)
             782,396           1,394,639                    (612,243)         (782,904)
             327,891              820,343                    (492,452)     (1,275,356)
             182,792              579,587                    (396,795)     (1,672,151)
             123,800              643,786                    (519,986)     (2,192,137)
             113,878              578,446                    (464,568)     (2,656,705)
             108,286              702,807                    (594,521)     (3,251,226)
             116,219              804,991                    (688,772)     (3,939,998)
             172,621              908,882                    (736,261)     (4,676,259)
             163,499              316,407                    (152,908)     (4,829,167)

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sold almost 5 million more copies in it's first 10 weeks. It outsold Halo 3 every single week for it's first 10 weeks, with the lowest margin being 152,000 units. I hardly call that 'similar', sir, and I'd like you to point out how I am wrong.

Could you give me a quote that states that PC/X360/PS3 development is, in fact, a great deal more expensive than developing for the PS3 alone? Every quote I've ever seen puts cross-platform development at a fraction of the actual budget requirements for developing the assets for the game. Admittedly, it does bring up the budget, but we know that it cannot exceed that of the advantage of a multi-plat release, or else developers wouldn't be flocking to bring their games to both the PS3 and 360.

I am not understanding your attacking me when I discussed Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii.  You stated that:

Besides, not every title needs to sell a certain amount of copies in a certain amount of time to be successful. Have the games with the biggest launches this generation been anywhere near the biggest selling or most profitable? Hell no.

To which, I gave you 2 examples of the 2 best selling full-priced games this gen, and the correlative factors that both games had excellent debuts. Mario Kart Wii is the highest-selling full priced title this generation, and also has the highest opening for any Wii title, and one of the highest for any console title this generation. The best selling title, Wii Fit, also sold at a blistering pace despite it's $99 price tag. That sir, is why I used them as comparison. Also I could argue that the next best-selling games this generation such as Halo, and Grand Theft Auto both had fantastic debuts, and are ranked very highly in the halls of top-selling console games this year.

I really don't get the maturity of your post, either:

I'm still laughing at the fact that you were so desperate as to bring up Mario Kart and Wii Fit to compare them to inFamous. Yes, we all know that Sony was expecting inFamous to be the new Wii Fit. Excuse me while I laugh at your expense. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. There, that's better.

Where was I equating them with Infamous? We had branched off into discussing debuts and the correlative factors of legs. I again state that we can find correlative factors of how and why almost every game - from Wii Fit to Infamous to Too Human will perform within a few first weeks. If you want to laugh at predictive analysis, feel free to, but I don't think that's very becoming of a mod, do you?

As for where I read that current HD titles cost $20m to make, here are my sources:

I tried to give reasonable comparisons of inFamous, yet you seem to feel that nothing is valid. Is there any arguing, then, if you want to throw out every example I can give? I think any of the games I listed are comparible. Infamous has done better than some (Godfather 2) but worse than others (Prototype, Crackdown, Saints Row 1/2). Argue as you like, but it still doesn't change the fact that Sony launched a new sandbox IP and has will most likely stay in that lower tier, just below Crackdown. I don't know, maybe Sony wanted that. Personally, InFamous looks like a fantastic game, and I'd argue that Sony/Sucker Punch wanted a knockout AAA game like they have with many of their other titles, and from the critical perspective, was certainly that. Since InFamous was neither developed on an in-house engine used in other games, saving asset costs, nor spanning multiple generations, one should be safe to assume it's budget is within the average - $15-$20 million dollars + $5-10m in marketing. If you want to argue that Sucker Punch will make money, while Sony loses money on it, feel free to, but I don't understand how that validates your argument. If the game was bad for one, better for another, I fail to see how that's a winning scenario.

Going back to development costs, there are certainly outliers, of which you gave great examples (Gears, Shenmue), but the fact is they are the exception, not the rule. Gears was made by a company that used an in-house engine. I've debated the merits of such, since I work for a game company that develops their own engine (Torque) - it drives costs down considerably vs. comparibles of similar fidelity. In Shenmue's case, we know it's budget was high because it's development cycle spanned 2 generations, driving up prices. It was certainly an outlier.

For the Crackdown comparison, I don't think that it's a valid argument that it only sold due to the Halo 3 beta, given the fact they are making a Crackdown 2. If that was all the title was good for, why bother with a sequel?

Again, I am sorry that I used language you considered trollish. It was not my intention to come off that way. I merely saw joined the conversation thinking 'I thought InFamous was doing very well?' only to find out it's been out for 3 months with <1,000,000 sales for one of the Playstation 3's best-reviewed titles with a very solid GameRankings score of 86.33%. I consider that bad. Many Sony fans seem to disagree, but that's fully within their perogative to discuss that with me. But please understand that my opinion is that of my own, and I was fully willing to discuss why I feel the way about InFamous that I do.

Halo 3 San Andreas Weekly Difference LTD Difference
         3,815,444           3,986,105                    (170,661)         (170,661)
             782,396           1,394,639                    (612,243)         (782,904)
             327,891              820,343                    (492,452)     (1,275,356)
             182,792              579,587                    (396,795)     (1,672,151)
             123,800              643,786                    (519,986)     (2,192,137)
             113,878              578,446                    (464,568)     (2,656,705)
             108,286              702,807                    (594,521)     (3,251,226)
             116,219              804,991                    (688,772)     (3,939,998)
             172,621              908,882                    (736,261)     (4,676,259)
             163,499              316,407                    (152,908)     (4,829,167)


Back from the dead, I'm afraid.