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potato_hamster on 10 January 2016
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AsGryffynn said:
potato_hamster said:

It could be undertracked, or it could just be the sales of Blood Dragon that wasn't tracked. We don't know. These announcements can be a bit nebulous.

Regardless - it's excuse after excuse. The fact of the matter is, even if we isolate the PS3's/PS4's North American install base, the PS3 had a much much larger install base when Far Cry 3 was released than the install base of the PS4 when Far Cry 4 came out.  If you want to talk secondary consoles (in terms of sales) and compare PS3 Far Cry 3 sales to Xbox One Far Cry 4 sales, the picture is even worse, and the X1 is selling much more closely to the PS4 in NA than the PS3 ever did with the X360.

However, the fact that its even close comparing Far Cry 3 PS3 sales to Far Cry 4 PS4 sales completely contradicts your argument that a platform's install base (if relatively healthy) can have a dramatically negative effect on a game's sales. I mean the Wii U has less than 6 million sales in North America and that platform has multiple games that have sold over a million copies in North America. Install base really is no excuse when you have 12 million North American Xbox Ones sold. That is more than enough consoles to have 2-3 million in sales.

Any way you look at it, if you're any bit consious of the video game landscape, the sales of Rise of the Tomb Raider are bad, and must incredibly disappointing for Square Enix and Microsoft. They definitely expected to have at least double the sales at this point.
 

You are the one who claimed the stuff I said was nebulous, even though I just proved opposite.

But I can't say that they were expecting at least 2 million. Sounds reasonable for current gen numbers and more so for XONE numbers, but I doubt 1M is low for a single platform. Unless you're implying they are referring to both, except for one thing. These are Christmas estimates, and this site has the combined sales of both at 1M BEFORE Christmas. Don't you think it's a bit stupid to claim that it refers to both?

Also, why would they expect 3M sales in one or two consoles after a few weeks? Do they realize that TR rarely sells those numbers on a single system? The PS3 version of the Reboot barely pulled 2.5M. Either someone has unrealistic expectations or someone is trying to make a good game seem bad for the sake of console war arguments. And you're missing an important point here. Most of the users in NA that were interested in games like Far Cry were on the Xbox 360 back then. Between that, undertracking and everything in between, I can safely say Far Cry 3 has sold more than Far Cry 4 to date...

Why should I believe you when Ubisoft is providing the information themselves?

How can you say you have proven anything?

Why would they expect 2-3 million sales in the first few weeks a AAA exlusive comes out? Mainly because there has been precident for that. There have been 15 games that have sold over 2 million copies on Xbox One, 11 of which were multi-platform games, 4 of which were exlusives. Titanfall was a brand new IP that MS paid Activision for console exclusivity. It sold nearly 3 million copies on the X1 and that game came out in the X1's first year. If Titanfall can do it, why shouldn't ROTTR? If anything it should be much easier for ROTTR to sell more copies than TF considering TF was already an established IP, and it was a sequel to a game that sold over 8 million copies world-wide. On top of that it was bundled with a 1TB console, and an extra controller, and sold at $349 during Black Friday. What else could MS possibly do to push this game?

But lif you want we can dive deeper into your theory that install base can dramatically affect sales. Let's look at Tomb Raider (2013). Based on sales, it's pretty obvious that North America is the dominant market for Tomb Raider, so let's look at the sales of the original release of the game:
PS3 - 2.5M (29.3M NA install base)
X360 - 1.9M (48.7M NA install base)

That seems a bit odd, doesn't it. According to your logic that a platform's lower install base should negatively impact sales, shouldn't the PS3 version sell less than the Xbox 360 version? Yet that's clearly not the case, even though there's almost 20 million more Xbox 360's in North America. This shouldn't happen if your theory is valid.

Don't like that example either? Want to argue that the fan base for Far Cry 3 was on Xbox 360, and now the majority of them are on PS4. Well I guess you can argue that, but that'd be difficult to prove.

But how do you explain the Witcher? he Witcher was a PC exclusive,  The Witcher 2 was an Xbox 360 console exclusive, which means the PS3 fan base for the WItcher series was precisely 0. Yet, when the Witcher 3 comes out as a multiplatform game for both PS4 and Xbox One, not only are the sales of the Witcher 3 on Xbox One higher than the sales of the Witcher 2 on Xbox 360, but PS4 sales were 3 times higher than Xbox 360 sales.

So please tell me how a multi-platform game that was never on a PS platform ever before can outsell a game by 3:1 over an exclusive game from the same series on a platform that has almost 3 times the sales? How is that even remotely possible if install base is a significant factor in a game's sales?

Again, given any reasonable metric, a franchise such as Tomb Raider selling 1 million copies in its first month is disappointing.