But the article implied that Madworld had lousy sales compared to Bayonetta, with the article author so cleverly comparing Bayonetta's lifetime sales with Madworld's first month...

Your points are valid, it seems that gaming journalism has uncovered the truth once again! *Shakes fist* I'll get you next time Gaming Journalism!

Madworld would have done poorly on any system. While it's fighting mechanics are fine that's about it. I could go on a mini review why it flubbed, but that would be beating a dead horse.

In some of the british internet-stores Bayonettas price was slashed within a month of release, but lets ignore that

Sounds like a bunch of horse crap to me. They don't need cutting-edge technology. They just made an RPG on the DS. And back when they were at Clover they were making really cutting-edge hardcore games like Okami and Viewtiful Joe.

@ melby )

in british internet stores prices for any game are slashed month _before_ a release

I dunno. But I bought the game for a total of like $11 (Thank you Amazon) and I stopped playing after the first stage was cleared. Kind of a lame game. I would've been upset had I paid full price for it.

Though to be honest I had just got done beating NMH II, and was used to that game's button layout. So that made things more difficult. I may go back and try again, since Red Steel 2 is somewhat of a disappointment.

Hmm.
I still can't get over how the publisher says one thing, and the development team says another.  

Now I wonder how much they expected it to sell. It is still selling now but c'mon, its $8 a copy. It will hit 550k sometime, but that won't matter either I guess. 

What really makes it a mismatch though? Is it because the game has no color except gratuitous amounts of red blood? Is it because the game is 5 hours long? 

Damn, I feel real sorry for Wii exclusive owners. They get blamed for not buying things; the Wii customer is always wrong. I know some people might be lying in this thread when they say they didn't like Madworld just because they want to refute the stance Hayes took on the sales, but some disappointment may be credible. 

Anyways, we just have another case where the Wii is neglected for not supporting weird ass games (Deadly Creatures). Madworld got ads, I'm not going to lie, Bayonetta got a lot too, but I guess being multiplatform will always put Wii sales at a disadvantage.

Now the budget of both games comes into question. I think I argued with amp316 (or someone else, maybe Khuutra) and came to the conclusion that Madworld cost $8-$9 million maximum (average Wii game is $5-$7 million, avg. team of 25-45 people) Sega probably spent 10%-30% of that on advertising, so Madworld could be in a range of $9m-$12.5 million in total.

I’d also say that it officially dropped in price after 6 weeks (finally dipped below in 10k NA+EU afterwards) in mid-May of 2009. At this point it netted 190k in sales already. In terms of revenue, I’d say it would be divided by [$4.7m Americas/ $4.75m Others].

Take that for what you will, but we can assume Bayonetta got the same production costs right?
………

Why should it, they're selling to an equal number of consumers, in fact, what with dual ownership this gen, it's more likely the Wii has a higher amount of people to sell to.

As many people love to point out, the Marketshare of the Wii is not 50% and probably never will be. The only figure of dual ownership I know is that 42% of Wii owners have an HD console.

More specfically, these titles (being multiplatform) may have more retail shelf space allocated to them and/or ads to cover both consoles. But more specifcally for Madworld vs. Bayonetta, look at their sales in Japan. You'd figure if the game is just as good, it would sell at least better than the 360 version of Bayonetta. There are what, 1.3 million Xbox360s over there? How could it get outsold by that?

Other than that, I would have to play that tired as demographic excuse again. Wii at this point has shitty Japanese support and had no type of audience to sell this to (still doesn't) but PS360 of course...... do.