Tretton: Heavy Rain will sell “incredibly well”

[Reasonable]

Hyruken said:
What i find funny is how people change the figures to suit certain games in terms of what they classify as "selling loads".
Some people have said selling 1m for this game = selling loads.

Surely all sales for video games have to be compared to each other?

Like for example some will say a RPG shouldnt sell that much as it is not a maintream shooter. But hang on the FF series, the Fallout series and so on and have sold many many millions, meaning RPGs have the potential to sell millions. Obviously shooters will sell millions.

Now this is an adventure game. A game that style has been done before, it is nothing new despite good old Jacks claims they are. But for sake of argument lets just leave it in the adventure genre.

So in comparison to other adventure games what would be considered selling loads?
Drakes Fortune sold millions, Lego Batman has sold millions, Heavenly sword sold millions, kung fu panda sold millions, marvel ultimate alliance sold millions etc etc

This game has taken ages to make, has spent a fortune on making it and has a big advertising campaign behind it.

To say this game has done well by getting to 1million in my opinion is a cop out. It should sell well beyond 2m in a year or it has bombed.

The reality is there are over 30m PS3's out there, if not even 1% wanted to play it then that says something about the appeal of the game to people. The fact that it is not popular doe not make it a bad game, it just makes it not a desired game.
Personally i think this game should sell around 500k in its first week at bare minimum or it has bombed.

Short answer.  No.

The reason is that different genres have different potential limits, just like films, and therefore performance is judged against that.  I just saw a french film the other night A Prophet, that was fantastic, but of course it has no chance of outperforming a Hollywood blockbuster (even though it's actually superior to most of those easily).

It's the same for games.  Would you expect a niche title to sell as much as MW2?  Of course not.  That's why you can't sensibly compare all video games to each other.  You can of course if you want, but it's a meaningless comparison.  Genres and game themes/content limit their potential demand base just like films.  Do you think United 93 when it released in the cinema had exactly the same potential demand as Avatar did recently?

Also, when people are calling this an adventure game they mean the original genre reference, not Lara Croft, Uncharted, etc. but point and click adventure games.

The money spent on the game is moot (other than obviously potentially limiting it's profitability) in terms of how much it will or should sell for it's genre.

I could spend $100 Million on an incredibly niche title - doesn't mean squat for the potential demand base.