Why did so many games sell so bad last year?

[celador]

Zax said:

celador said:
Lots of different reasons.

Most of the annual games have been going for a long time and people are getting bored of them.

Games like GoW, Metal Gear Rising and Gears were spin offs and were never going to sell as much as the main series.

Sly Cooper is an old IP and a platformer, and aside from Mario those kinds of games never sell as much as they used to.

Some games, like Dead Island Riptide and Crysis 3 don't deserve high sales because they are not very good.

The other games you listed are concerning though, games like Tomb Raider and especially Bioshock deserved to sell more, but there are only so many 'hardcore' gamers around, and clearly not enough to sustain as many AAA titles as are being released.

Bit of a coincidence that all those annual games sold considerably less. Yeah Call of Duty is probably on it's way out but Fifa had been doing better year after year.

God of War Ascension wasn't a spinoff it was a prequel and no it wasn't going to sell as well as GoW3 but to sell a third of the amount when over twice as many people owned a PS3 is terrible. Same for Gears of War it should have sold better just on name alone. Halo Reach was a spinoff and it's sold better than Halo 4.

Metal Gear Rising also should have sold better.

God of War and Gears were seen as spin offs even if they were not technically.  If I remember rightly there wasn't a load of hype for either.  I don't really think there is much point comparing them to Halo either becuase that's one of a handful of games that sell massive numbers regardless

I think the new consoles played a big part in the decrease in the annual franchises as well.  Transition in the games people want change very quickly at the start of a new generation and people do not want to necessarily play the same games on a new, more powerful machine.  That is why there is usually a dominant genre of games in each generation, because the best new games at the start of the generation tend to remain popular the nextgen.  It used to be racing games, then platformers, then FPS and it looks like open-world 'mingleplayer' might be the new favourite genre this time.

Like I said in my previous post, it also has a lot to do with not having enough gamers to support so many big franchises. Unless there is another reason you can think of?