Is Epic Mickey a lesson to third parties?

[MaxwellGT2000]

silicon said:

jarrod said:

Lostplanet22 said:

AAA. game...Quality...And it has an 72 on metacritic... They just made a Disney game for the audience who wants it.   They just could made a Mickey Party game and it would also pass 1-2 million sales;.

AAA game is a reflection on the scale of budget, not the inbred industry press critical responses to it.  Lost Planet 2, despite having an even worse metacritic rating of 68-63 (depending on platform), is still most certainly a AAA game in the sense that's being talked about in this thread.

And Mickey Party probably would've done as well as Pca-Man Party (ie: not at all).  Disney has said Epic Mickey is their most successful sales launch in history.  Better than any of the Kingdom Hearts games even, none of which passed 1.3m their first NPDs btw, in fact none even sold half that.  This is hardly a business as usual release or performance, attributing Epic Mickey's sales to the brand/audience alone is basically you sticking your head in the sand...

I think NOT attributing a lot of sales to brand / audience is sticking your head in the sand. Most game sales trends point to that. Also, Kindom Hearts may have grown the Disney brand within a certain audience thus generating more sales for the next Disney games.

Quality of a game is something noone will experience until they actually buy the game... but at that point the game is already sold.

Budget also helps to in the sense that there's good marketing and that the game is polished to make pretty gameplay videos.

Well you also got to factor in game quality, cause think about it, Wii was built off the backs of social gamers talking about games like Wii Sports, having friends over to play, and the like.  It's the very reason games like Just Dance with no marketing at all became a craze in of itself, quality game, with a nice soundtrack, and it's fun to make a fool of yourself with friends.

So word of mouth/socializing has a lot to do with the success or failure of certain titles.  Marketing actually helps this since they are social gamers they'll talk about the ads or get the game cause of the ad when they wouldn't have otherwise and then tell their friends...  but if its a bad game word of mouth doesn't work.  Many PS2 and PS1 games sold under these same premises.