Cross-generation series sales breakthroughs.

[Michael-5]

Yakuzaice said:

Michael-5 said:

Yakuzaice said:

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.

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.

Anyway I agree with you, you have proved to me that much of Forza Motorsport 2's sales were due to bundles. The only difference is you think at most 2 million of Forza Motorsport 2 sales are legitimate, where I'm more leniant towards 3 million.

The game had sold 1 million units in 5 months on it's own, something PGR4 took a year to do and PGR4 sold 2 million total, so to me 2 million natural sales for Forza 2 seems a bit off. I think Forza would have sold moderatly well fall 2007 without bundles, and sales after that I think were largly to it's own accord. Not 115k weekly, but maybe 20-35 k weekly.

Regardless 2 million non bundled sales versus 3 million non bundled sales, thats still a lot more then 1 million sales, and I honestly do not know if Forza 1 was bundled (it probably was too). It's still a cross-generation breakthrough.

P.S. GT games are all bundled too and they get 10 million sales each, thats a pretty big boost for Forza to go to 4 million, it's now a proper GT compeditor. I love Forza...