Michael-5 said:
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. |
The 4k was in reference to American sales where it saw a massive jump week over week. Although, actually I see where you are getting the late November date from. There was a Forza 2/Viva Pinata bundle in Europe (at least the UK and the Netherlands) released in that time frame. You can see the two games align in sales the last couple weeks of November, and then they both have huge increases in December to a peak of 75k for Forza and 74k for Viva Pinata. The only games that sold more (in others) were COD4 and Assassin's Creed.
So Forza 2 did over 2 million from mid October through the holiday season. Marvel did around 1.85 million, and Viva Pinata did 400k (about 350k in Others). In comparison, Marvel did 360k in its launch holiday season, and Viva did 222k. Looks like both sets of games were also pretty close to each other throughout at least half of 2008.
Around 2.5 million of Forza 2's sales were affected by bundles. I believe there was also an Australian, and maybe another in PAL at launch, but there is no way to really tell what would have been bundled sales, so let's discount that. If the bundle sales were really less than 1 million like you say, then that means Marvel did, at the bare minimum, one million sales starting in mid October. That would be more than double what it did in its first 53 weeks. It would also be assuming the Forza bundle in Europe didn't sell a single unit, and all of those were disc copies.
Looking at everything, the sales of the other bundled games, the holiday boosts for other old games, and the fact that a game that is bundled extensively probably won't be something new owners buy seperately (i.e. if I'm looking to buy and xbox and I want Forza, I'm going for the bundle not both individually). I'd say bundles accounted for at least 2 million of Forza 2's sales, possibly a couple hundred thousand more.
Also this thread seems to be quite derailed.
