WW up April 9th 2011

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Michael-5 said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

[...]

The biggest possible damage can be from undecided buyers liking racers and not owning any console yet this gen, some of them, finding both consoles and both games heavily advertised, and F3 bundled with 360, and maybe considering that more friends of theirs owned a 360, could have chosen F3 bundle, with the bundle itself becoming the decisive argument to reject the temptation to buy PS3 and GT5 instead. A small part of possible damage could come from people not fully persuaded yet  and just being distracted by the competitor's advertising. Oh, yes, this is my opinion. I got also another theory, just an opinion anyway:  MS could have had no intention at all to damage GT5, but just to exploit the marketing of its launch, attracting people to stores, just to find that there were two big racers filling the shelves.

This said, Sony and PD should, IMVHO, make some little improvements, maybe when they release the next special edition: make the most hardcore gamers happy giving the option to have the most realistic damage model since the start instead of after leveling up, add some tracks and cars appealing for American tastes, do the same for Japanese tastes,  and finally upgrade a good selection of cars from Standard to Premium, and please, avoid adding or upgrading any other Nissan Skyline, just because PD devs have clearly a fetish for it doesn't imply that anybody else must have it!!!   

All opinion, we can't really tell if the FM3 bundle hurt or helped GT5's sales. There are reasons for both.

Also the Forza Motorsport 3 bundle only composed of 1 million 360's (Forza 3's sale jumped 1.3 million from before te bundle to its end, and at least 300k should have been due to the Ultimate Edition FM3 and the 4 month period of sales). So no matter what this didn't affect GT5 sales that much. I'm sure most people who bought this bundle were planing on getting a 360 anyway.

However I'll agree with you on your second theory. By bundling FM3 during GT5's launch, it probably helped give Forza a name for itself.

PD and Nissan actually have a very long relationship with each other, so no matter what you're going to see a lot of Nissans in the game because Nissan uses the game to promote their vehicles, and both PD and Nissa are Japanese. PD won't sell out to non-Japanese dealers.

As for improvements, what do you mean adding tracks more suited for Japanese and American tastes? GT5 has basically all the tracks older GT's have had, and they all sold fine in Americas and Japan. IMO Trail Mountain is the best fictional track ever made, and Tsuba (that tiny one) is the most famous Japanese race track.

However I agree with you about including damage from the start, and upgrading more cars from Standard to Prenium. Damage should be adjustable like in Forza, and 200 prenium cars is just nowhere nearly enough. I only race in car view so that last on really bugs me, but at least some of my favorite cars have in car view, and rear in car view too.

I hope FM4 gets rear in car view...

Just like for Premium and Standard cars, I suspect Americans and the Japanese want some more stuff this time, be it that they expect more from a successive chapter of the series, be it that this expectation came from the hype and long waiting for the game, while judging from sales the variety of tracks and cars and playing modes is good enough in EMEAA, but obviously any addition won't hurt here either. BTW, I suspect that adding some recent powerful diesel cars (Alfa Romeo, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, etc) could furtherly improve the already excellent success in EMEAA.

About car view, me too, I really can't drive a car in external view, except in the most arcade and easy games, that I don't like very much.