mrstickball said:
MM9 did far better than MM10. However, that is the trend for virtually every downloadable game - no sequel ever out-sells the initial title. I don't have all the actuals right in front of me, so take my estimates with a little grain of sand: MM 9 = ~450,000 MM 10 = ~225,000 Sonic 4 Ep1 = ~450,000 Sonic 4 got hammered by user ratings. Its under a 4.0 on every service, AFAIK, which is bad for its pedigree. Its legs are starting to set in, though, and should have a very long and fruitful lifespan. By comparison, you can pick an original Sonic title from Virtual Console or XBLA, and it sold almost as well as Sonic 4 did on all platforms combined, so its really not a 'Sega can't sell games on DD services' problem, but instead a 'Sonic 4 really didn't perform to expectations' problem. Oh, and as a bonus (concerning the platformers argument): LIMBO (XBLA) outsold all listed mentioned by pretty strong margins. Its likely to gross more money in the future than any platformer on any other downloadable service (Mario VC titles included). |
That's... quite the drop for MM10 actually! MM10's been hard for the usual sources to track on XBLA due to no leaderboards, but it's weekly placing has always been fairly terrible (launch week it only managed 4th place even, though that was partly attributed to it launching a week earlier on PSN and WiiWare), so I'm not sure if those numbers entirely add up even. Capcom's also been dead silent on it (unlike MM9, which they were pretty vocal about being a success). I really think Capcom & inti would've been better off doing a SNES styled MMX9 instead. I also don't see MMU doing all that well in the future, it's visuals have been pretty divisive/panned, which is often the death knell for new-retro oriented titles.
Sonic 4 has been almost universally critically panned, I think Sega & Dimps would've been much better served killing the Episodic DD release in favor of a "full" retail title. I think rather than 500k, they could be looking at 5m if it were a real "return to form" at retail. Even a flawed retail product could've done better though I think, cutting out retail I have to imagine also cuts out a significant portion of the reliable Sonic fanbase (especially on Wii). This is going to be a perpetual problem for bigger brand titles on DD versus retail imo, for the foreseeable future. GameBytes estimates also put the XBLA figures really, really low (like under 50k territory so far, lower even than Sonic Adventure on XBLA), so I'm a little curious about your 450k overall estimate if XBLA really is leading?
I know Limbo's done amazingly well, it was heavily promoted as part of Summer of Arcade, it's gotten seasonal discounts and it got a significant amount of industry press attention. Last I saw (Gamerbytes estimates in Sept/Oct I think) put it near 600k, and still doing 30-50k monthly iirc. Braid was a similar success story a year earlier, and I think Super Meat Boy will continue the trend. Still, there seems to be an elevated level for all these games, especially above the Indie games doldrums where you'd normally expect this sort of content were it not hand selected by Microsoft to go elsewhere. It's another problem with XBL for smaller and independent developers, there's no even playing field; you get hand picked and highly promoted, or you get tossed into the Indies "3rd world" and mostly ignored. Wiiware seems to have almost the opposite problem, everyone gets the same treatment, it's just shitty for all. :/
I think it's pretty strong words to predict Limbo will gross more than any VC Mario though. Mainly because VC is almost guaranteed to graduate to Wii 2 (continuing sales to a likely more online oriented machine), while Limbo's post 360 sales are very much a question (as are it's sustained sales... Braid eventually fizzled and Limbo may as well). In Limbo's favor though, it's pricepoint is 3 times higher than a VC NES title... to outsell SMB1 for example, it only has to sell a third as much (at full price).
