| mrstickball said: I don't want to attack other places that do estimates, but....Gamasutra's methodology behind tracking Sonic is flawed. They are using leaderboards to track a game that cannot be tabulated via leaderboards. Leaderboards for Sonic 4 are only updated in the event that a user actually checks the leaderboards themselves - which not everyone will do. I can't pull it up right now, but Sonic 4 led sales on Major Nelson's Top 10 for its debut week, which beat out titles like Dead Rising: Case Zero which sold very well in October (>60k), so that gives you a minimum threshold for what Sonic did. For the argument of promotions - you can argue that the games are performing well only due to Microsoft's promotion. I can understand that, but it doesn't change the argument that other non-MS promoted platformers have done very well like N , The Maw, and Cloning Clyde which all sold well over 100,000 units (N did over 300k and had no promotion by MS). Super Meat Boy was never promoted by MS as a marquee title, like LIMBO or Braid, so it should be a good example of sales. It has sold 160k on XBLA and over 250k on Steam. As for your argument about sales fizzling - that does not happen on XBLA. Braid never fizzled. It still sells very well, relative to its first month on market. Every title on XBLA still sells well, relative to their release, which is why LIMBO will reach great heights. Very few games ever provide major outliers in terms of long-tail. That is, every XBLA, PSN or WiiWare title is an evergreen title, unless they had abysmal sales their first month. Put it this way: the average Xbox Live Arcade title, 2 years after release, will still be grossing approximately 5% of its first-month revenue every month, and will continue to do so, indefinately. Braid still sells about 5-7% of its first month. So does Shadow Complex, Mega Man 10, and so on. A few titles are well above this like Castle Crashers and Trials HD, but in general, the rule of thumb is 5% forever, as the game almost never gets de-listed. Since LIMBO was the marquee title of Summer of Arcade 2010, it is likely to reach higher numbers due to popularity, and should still be selling 7-10% of its first month sales, 2 years from now (or about 25,000-30,000 copies per month, every month). |
I should've read closer, GamerBytes indeed mentioned the difficulty for correctly measuring Sonic 4E1 due to the nature of it's scoreboard process. I'm curious what metrics you're using to arrive at sales though? The "minimum threshold" based off Case Zero's 62k October sales is pretty faulty given Sonic 4 was only even available for 3 of those weeks. By it's 4th week (in November) Sonic 4 was outside the XBLA top 10 even according to Nelson, and well below Case Zero. Speaking of which, Nelson didn't post the top Live activity lists in October at all due to his schedule... can you kindly link me to where exactly he posted Sonic 4 leading it debut week?
Looking it up, Braid went from ~326k sales it's first full year to ~64k it's second full year (GB estimates). That's still pretty decent in terms of legs, but doing just 20% of it's first year sales in it's second isn't exactly stellar given it's one of the high watermark XBLA success stories, and not even uncommon at retail for high volume sellers (indeed the top retail games are doing significantly more than just 20% YOY). Braid didn't even make the top 20 XBLA sellers for 2009 (yet even titles like TMNT1, Marble Blast and Puzzle Fighter did), I'd say that's fair game for "fizzled". It's first week sales according to Blow himself were 55k, and 1st month was "over 100k" which puts the year two ratio (on average) just slightly above 5% monthly of that too (and that's best case, if Braid did over 106k, it drops below 5%). Digital still has a shelf life, it's different from retail in many ways, but it's still a shelf life with promotion, media coverage, word of mouth, accessibility, competition, sequels and other factors weighing in on the long term success of the product (including the potential for delisting or future platform incompatibility). If Braid only barely manages your month 5% average of 1st month figure, and it's inarguably one of the services sales highlights, I very much have to question the validity of your figure at all. And Limbo did 323k it's first full month... 25-30k monthly into perpetuity is a nice dream, but looking at the above figures, it seems it'll only be ever that. ;)
I also feel the need to correct you on "Microsoft promotions", while titles like N Plus, Super Meat Boy, The Maw and Cloning Clyde weren't part of the summer of arcade promotions, each title did get significant dashboard visibility, repeated promotional discounts and the last two were even published by Microsoft. In fact, Team Meat went on record saying that their tie up (for promotion and positioning on Live Arcade) with MS even prevents them from doing a PSN version of SMB, ever. This is actually part and parcel of Microsoft's divided kingdom for indie devs, even getting on "Arcade" rather than "Indies" is considered a promotional service in itself between Microsoft and small developers. Do you think any of these games would've sold even a fraction as much on the latter tier service?
