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Sales - Impact of GTA4 - View Post

naznatips on 08 July 2007
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RolStoppable said:
naznatips said:

Yes, I do think SMG has more casual appeal. WE know that you can just jump in and play Brawl and have a blast, but the average joe buying games would look at it as a fighting game, which automatically turns off the casual beacon. It certainly has more casual appeal than any other fighting game, but it's still a fighting game which limits it. Super Mario Galaxy though is Mario. EVERYONE knows the name Mario. The people who bought a Wii for Wii sports will buy a Mario game.

You have to think about it from their perspective. Name recognizability is very important to a casual's purchase of a game. They buy games they recognize with characters they recognize. GT sells because GT always sold well. GTA's ridiculous milking attempts sell because everyone knows what GTA is already. Smash Bros is not guaranteed to sell to the casual though because most of the characters won't be recognized by casual gamers and the game will look overwhelming.


Okay, here's my prediction: Brawl will end up with higher LTD sales than Galaxy. Why?

Because even though many gamers skipped the GC last generation they still played Melee on their friend's system and they loved it. Now that the Wii is the hot system all those people who loved Smash Bros. but didn't own a GC will go out and buy a Wii along with Brawl sooner or later. Galaxy and Brawl will both selling 10m+ LTD, but Brawl will sell better because of the multiplayer alone. The social component in games (playing with friends on the same system) will be more important this generation than ever before.

I don't get your point that Brawl won't sell that well to casuals because they don't know most of the characters. There are still plenty of characters in the game most casual gamers for sure know about: Mario, Luigi, Kirby, Link, Pikachu are amongst the most popular names in videogames.


I disagree.  Super Mario Sunshine almost sold as much as SSBM without any casuals on the Gamecube (or very few).  With all the Wii casuals I think chances are very good that they will boost Mario sales more than Smash sales.  Either way I agree with you that both have a good chance of getting very good sales, maybe up to 10 million with the kind of legs they will have.