No way it could have done much better if it was a console exclusive. If it was a 360 exclusive it might have done better on the 360 but the overall would be the same.

wouldn't have sold more just for not being exclusive. The ps3 version will still sell 500k , maybe inch its way up to a mil. I bet next week's sales will be higher as some former killzone 3 fans return their games and pick up bulletstorm. It was just a bad move to release it for the ps3 that week. It would be like someone releasing a new zombie franchise the same week as left4dead2. Initially everyone is going to pick left4dead2. Then the fans who end up being dissappointed, you can't please everyone, will end up returning their game and trying out the new zombie game.

It could have sold more with a much bigger advertising campaign, but it didn't need to be exclusive to get it. Call of Duty shows the vast majority of players on both systems don't care at all whether a game is exclusive.

I just don't agree with you.  At all.  MS has the best marketing team in all of gaming and if they had put their full force of advertising into this, putting emphasis on how "The best shooters are on 360" tagline or something savy like that, and put it into direct competition with Killzone why wouldn't it have done MUCH bigger numbers.  I'm sure of it on this one. 

You don't think all those core gamers on the 360 who have had zero exclusive for the first six months of the year wouldn't have gotten FAR more excited at having one of their favorite developers developing an exclusive and delivering it at a dry time for 360 owners?  Trust me it would have done better, at the very least initially, as an exclusive.  I have yet to see a compelling argument that counters this, every aspect just lines up and points to it being a big success as an exclusive.  And as I've said countless times rarely do I say that, I'm a big supporter of multi-plat development.

Except that, you know, its made by people can fly and not epic games so its not exactly their favourite developers.

Except that, Epic games owns People Can Fly 100% so yes it is an Epic game and that Cliffy B himself was the lead development advisor on the game and played and worked on it 3 days a week with them, it even says it in the credits of the game.

I see.

So you are saying if MS published this game, and advertised the sh*t out of it, it would have rivaled Killzone 3 or at least done as much as 500K.

I disagree. They don't need to have published by MS to do 500K. All they needed to do was release it at a different time.

imo April would have been the best time since there are no big FPS's releasing that month that I know of.

MS can only publish so many IPs made by 3rd party. Its not like everything MS publishes is a hit, and the developers who make it hardly matter if the game is not interesting.

Most of the people who play gears of war don't care about epic games, or cliffyB. I know this because I was one of them.

Bulletstorm only did well on the 360 because of gears beta, otherwise it would have bombed there as well. It bombed on the PC, it bombed on the PS3, it almost bombed on the 360.

Surely having the beta for one of the exclusives should be enough, right?

To PS3 platform loyalists, the general amount of crap talk from Epic (more specifically from their always opinionated developer face, Bleszinski) doesn't exactly endear them to PS3 gamers.

Of course for most, a good game is a good game worth a first day purchase and in the case of Bulletstorm, it was simply bested by KZ3. People who owned a PS3 went with the better game. Or maybe they also bought Bulletstorm for their 360 or PC; it just didn't steal many sales from KZ3.

Epic may well have been better off selling the game to MS as a MS platform exclusive (Xbox/Windows) had MS offered them a big payoff for even a year of exclusivity. Maybe no such offer was made. From MS' perspective, maybe marketing Bulletstorm as a MS exclusive could have helped generate more hardware sales with more "only on Xbox and Windows" ads. Or maybe they just didn't deem the game as important enough.

400k combined are good first week sales, but paying a substantial amount for an exclusive release plus MS marketing to emphasize the exclusivity probably wouldn't have been worth it to MS for an additional 60k unit sales that ended up on the PS3. So maybe it was better off as is.

Not really, the Gears Beta was an added  bonus and certainly made SOME people buy it but not many went out and spent $60 just for a Beta.  That's rediculous that's as much as the actual game Gears of War 3 will be.  This is the kind of game that appeals to 360's demographic more than the other game systems, is developed by a team that has seen huge success on 360 and has a huge fanbase and has a fantastic relationship with hardware manufactureer themselves in Microsoft.  Bulletstorm would have seen virtually ZERO competition in exclusive 360 game space for the first 6 months of the year so it would have had a Massive marketing budget from MS to use to compete with a flagship shooter for the PS3 in Killzone.  And would have seen far more hype being a 360 exclusive in discussions and such.  Think about how many more threads and coverage there would have been for Bulletstorm had it been exclusive, 360 fans would want to discuss it more as a reason for owning a 360 and would have put it in comparisons with Killzone.

I just truely believe this is one of those RARE circumstances where exclusive would have been better than multiplat.  All the signs just add up.

IMO it should have launched on the Wii, using motion on the weapons AND the whip thingy would have been really cool.

Probably would have sold more than the PS3 version, too.

The only thing that would have made it worth being exclusive to 360 would have been Gears level of support from MS.  But... I don't think that would have happened for this game.  Too new, too quirky no big online hook I can see.  TBH if Bulletstorm had been exclusive to 360 I think it would have launched more in line with Alan Wake in terms of hype/interest, which is roughly where it was anyway.

It's a mistake to think marketing guarantees anything.  I can help a lot.  But the product has to live up to it.  Gears got a huge push from MS that really, really helped but the fact the game was AAA excellent made the different.  Bulletstorm, despite the Epic link, is a good but not AAA game and as such wouldn't see the same benefits.

The best chance for the title was to be multi- which is why it was released and developed that way.  EA/Epic then made a really poor choice of launch date on PS3 and paid - so far - a heavy price.  Comparing the PS3/360 ratio to other 85% rated solid FPS it's clear they've managed to flush away a lot of sales on PS3 by deciding to compete with a platform exclusive for sales.

We can discuss the pros/cons of being exlcusive for the title, but the real issue in reality - given the title wasn't and won't be - is why in hell they essentially sent the game to die on PS3?  Not that I think there was any conspiracy about it - just poor decisions that surprise me.