Cross-generation series sales breakthroughs.

[Michael-5]

Yakuzaice said:

Michael-5 said:

Yakuzaice said:

I guess my edit came in late, but come on, did you really think it was selling 224k on it's own accord?  50k more than Halo 3.  The only other games that got a boost like that were from Nintendo, everything else was relatively new or bundled.

Well Forza is Microsofts counter towards Gran Turismo. A lot of casual gamers buy this type of game. I'll admit a bundle boosted sales, but to my knowledge Forza was bundled with the 360 late into november 2007, after the game had feasibly sold well on it's own. That 224k week was one special high sale week before it got bundled, before that it was pushing 100k per week, and it probably had a lower dip sometime between its launch and Christmas sales.

I don't even know if the bundle was outside ameircas too, and it was only on Elite consoles, which sold accounted for 10% of the 360 sold at the time (Most people bought Pro 360's).

I mean next time you go to EB, look at all the copies of used Forza titles. Most of them are not Ultimate Alliance/Forza 2 boxes (they came in one game box, maybe on the same disk).

Also they did make forza a Platnium hit title. I think it counts.

The Forza/Marvel bundle was for both the Elite and the Pro.  I can't really find an exact date for the bundle, but most suggest October, not end of November.  But seriously, either it came out in October or the numbers are wrong.  Even if you really believe Forza can go from ~4k to over 200k from Oct to Nov, how do you explain Marvel: Ultimate Alliance doing 214k the same week Forza did 224k?  The only other game that is almost as old (that sold decent numbers) is Gears of War, and that only sold 34k that week.

Which explanation makes more sense?  That Forza 2 and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance are Nintendo-esque franchises that can pull incredible holiday numbers months and years after release. 

Actually let's look at some of those Nintendo titles.  On the week ending Nov 24th Forza/Marvel are sitting between games such as Nintendogs, Brain Age/2, and Pokemon.  Now go back to the week ending Oct 13th.  Forza sold 18k (about 14k was from Europe, and on the 224k week Europe had only gone up to 18k) and Marvel sold 867.  The Nintendo games sold  52k, 85k/58k, and 103k respectively.  So does Microsoft have a better holiday boost than Nintendo (but only for Forza 2 and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and only in America), or did the bundle kick in the week ending October 20th and not the week ending December 1st.

I'm sure Forza 2 would have been a Platinum title bundle or not, the original on the xbox was as well.

Anyways, all this text boils down to two things, Forza 2 sales jumped over 15x in one week, and it increased by almost the exact same amount that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance did, and continued to align with it throughout the holidays.  Everything points to the bundle starting the week ending October 20th.

First of all Forza was never selling ~4k weekly until years after launch, but I do see a jump in VGChartz data on the week ending October 20th. Sales jumped from 15-18k to 80-120k, or about 5x. Still by this point, Forza Motorsport 2 just crossed 1 million.

You made a good point, I probably got a wrong date (or got the date an article was written instead of the bundle date).

Also Forza numbers were only inflated that first fall. I can't even find it the next fall, but I imagine it didn't sell that differently then PGR4.

Now Forza Motorsport 2 sold 1 million units without bundles in just over 4 months, also the 4 slowest months of game sales (June-October). PGR4 was never bundled and took about a year to break 1 million units sold. PGR4 ended up with 1.98 million sales. Even though Forza Motorsport 2 was bundled, I'm still betting over 3 million, were non-bundled sales. I mean even in fall 2007, when Forza 2 was selling 115k weekly, I bet 25-40k of those sales were natural sales. It had similar sales to Gears of War 1, and should have had weekly sales above PGR4.

I admit, I was wrong, but I still stand on my arguement that bundles did not make up the majority of the sales like you beleive. Forza 1 selling 1 million and Forza 2,3 selling 3 million each is a big jump, so it still counts.