WW UP 12th of November

[Reasonable]

Slimebeast said:

Reasonable said:

Slimebeast said:
Happy for Skyrim's sales obviously (my original optimistic prediction was 2 million first week).

X360 surprisingly good sales. I don't understand how it can outsell the PS3.

Fablle 3 selling almost 100K, please tell me that's because of bundles.

The Skyrim sales are great, however I believe they could relatively easily be better.  With a little more marketing effort and sense Bethesda could easily have seen higher PS3 sales than they did IMHO.  Like most developers more associated with 360 they seem to struggle to shake free of the reputation of previous titles.  They should have looked at how Valve handled Portal 2.

Still great sales - and great game - but it just maddens me to see multi-platform titles allowed to slump (relativly speaking) on one platform vs another due to basic marketing errors.

In terms of 360 outselling PS3 it's simply down to having the bigger market for this time of year and the right deals and momentum.  The PS3 outsold the 360 earlier in the year for the same reason really, outside of holidays the general demand outside US is higher, during this period US often has more demand than other territories so the advantage flips from PS3 to 360 for a while.

BTW I bet you're enjoying Skyrim, right?  I bought two copies by mistake but I might swap one for a console version rather than return it just to directly compare console to PC.

The marketing effect (or lack of it) on Skyrim never crossed my mind. What should they have done to increase sales of PS3 version?

About the X360 sales, yes the NA market becomes proportonately bigger at this time of year but just in general, as an Xbox fan myself I have a hard time seeing where gamers see the value in the Xbox 360 compared to PS3, when the PS3 has free online, better games, bigger BRAND (remember that argument? ) and has a very attractive price now.

I'm enjoying Skyrim very much. Kinda suffering from fatigue right now. I want to play constantly but my mind is tired and slow. Weekends are so short and workdays so long. :(

How did you end up buying 2 copies of the same game??

I was ordering a few games with 2 copies to give the second as a gift and accidently included Skyrim in the list.  Lucky for Bethesda my kids want it on console rather than PC so I've agreed to swap the second PC disk for console rather than return it.

As for marketing the error I see is that Bethesda made no effort to specifically push the game to PS3.  This I believe is a mistake.  Valve showed you don't lose any 360 sales by making a big push on PS3 with Portal 2, and I really think more developers in Bethesda's position should do this.  It's about making it clear there is no favourite platform and making sure both titles are equal.  Instead Bethesda developed on 360 and ported, left the market with the impression 360 would likely get DLC first and generally didn't do anything to make the title more appealing to PS3 owners.

As a result while the title saw the stellar 360 (and PC from what I can see on Steam) numbers it deserves the PS3 version is below what I believe a better marketing effort would have delivered.  Not that PS3 numbers are bad (just under 1 million after all) but they should have been at least around 300 to 350 K higher IMHO going by install base and more recent ratio splits of similar titles.  Still, great numbers whatever.