Article: When "Must-Have" Games do not sell, who is to blame?

[shio]

RolStoppable said:

eugene said:
The answer is clear. Not enough systems were sold to the people who would buy it. Example, Ratchet and Clank would sell 3 million to the casuals on the PS2, but since they dont own a PS3, it wont sell to them. UT3 looks way generic and just another Unreal game like all the others before it and people would rather get COD 4. Uncharted doesnt look new or exciting at all. Drake is the most generic looking charachter ever. Just a regular clean cut white boy from Bayside High. Zach and Wiki, uhh, what is that??

An adventure game for the Wii which hasn't been released in Europe yet.

It's a little too early to call it a flop considering that the game might sell the most in Europe and the development budget of the game was rather low. 300k lifetime should be enough for the game to turn in a healthy profit for Capcom (and meet their sales expectations for the game I think).

I think RolStoppable's post must be given a proper mention. Historically the US market hasn't been significant as a target for Adventure games since the demise of the old Lucas Arts, and Asia has never given a chance to the Adventure genre... most of Adventure games' sales are in Europe, so if Zack & Wiki reach 150k sales outside of Europe it must be considered a success, especially if you take in account it's low budget and being in a genre pratically unexistant in consoles.

If Z&W does well enough on Wii, I can see Capcom porting it to PC, where the bigger fanbase exists.

hunter_alien said:

Game_boy said:

hunter_alien said:
UT3 is not really fare . It was released only in the US partially and only for 2 weeks ... it could do muvh batter ...

The PC version has also flopped from what I've read. Looks like hardcore PC gamers are more into potential hardware than stuff that uses it.

Yes , the PC version floped , but thats not the case at this point with the PS3 version . The PC version barely reached 40k in a month , while the PS3 version did that in its first days :) And the game should be a PC seller , not a console one :)

I think UT3 did 34k, 50% of what Epic was expecting (67k). A big flop, especially considering it barely entered the NPD PC top20 (it reached 19th place only).

The US is not a big PC market. With it's +300million inhabitants, it has a smaller PC market than Germany (80million) and South Korea (50million), just to put thing into perspective. US probably is about 15% of the entire PC market. Now, if a PC game comes close to 100k in the first weeks, then it's a definite success, like Crysis which did 87k and 25% higher than expectations in the NPD.

 

Game_boy said:

hunter_alien said:
UT3 is not really fare . It was released only in the US partially and only for 2 weeks ... it could do muvh batter ...

The PC version has also flopped from what I've read. Looks like hardcore PC gamers are more into potential hardware than stuff that uses it.

UT3 is decent but there are much better PC FPS out there, and UT3 brought nothing new to it's franchise.