| Mr Khan said:
They could be more profitable too, come to that. We can all agree that without Sonic, Sega really doesn't have any mainstream presence though, right? The PC games are certainly there, but don't generate a lot of buzz. |
If they are going forward with $20m budgets and are unable to reverse their sales trajectory they certainly won't be more profitable. Especially if they don't get those sales till it drops in price. Sonic Lost World is currently $30 on Amazon, and was available for that price as early as mid December. In comparison Yakuza is frontloaded with high Japanese prices.
Yakuza 5 sold ~360k at 8800 yen. Even at todays exchange rates that would be the equivalent of 1.03m units of Lost World sold at $30. If the Yen were to get back to where it was on Dec 8th, 2012 (launch date of Yakuza 5) it would be equivalent to 1.28m copies at $30 in the US.
What exactly is mainstream presence in the current gaming climate and how valuable is it? Total War: Rome II hit 800k shipped as of Sept 30th. That is 25% more than Lost World shipped across the Wii U and 3DS through the end of December. Football Manager 13 hit 940k. Massive games like League of Legends, World of Tanks, DOTA 2, Crossfire, etc get very little exposure on video game websites/forums compared to the average console release. Rust sold a million copies in 2 months, and apparently just passed $30 million in revenue which would imply about 500k in the last half month. There doesn't seem to be a single thread on it here on VGC, and barely any discussion on DayZ.
If PC games aren't generating buzz, then maybe the buzz isn't very useful.
