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Forums - Sales Discussion - Conduit June sales (NPD - 2 weeks) - 71,913

Dazkarieh on 17 July 2009
mrstickball said:
Agreeing with a lot of realilists in this thread.

The Conduits sales are atrocious for the first 2 weeks. If you want to argue that one of the biggest exclusive FPSes launching at <100k in 2 weeks is 'good', then feel free to. But don't mind me calling you crazy for it.

The Wii base here is ravenous. No More Heroes didn't bomb. Madworld didn't bomb. Zak & Wiki didn't bomb. In fact, no Wii game has ever bombed. 100% of Wii titles have sold perfectly fine, while it's totally reasonable to call out games like Bionic Commando, Haze, or Too Human as being failures. This seems to be the logic of many Wii fans here.

I think people need to wake up and smell the coffee. No system is perfect in what it can sell. The X360 has it's turds, as does the PS3. Just because the Wii is leading the market doesn't mean that it has a 100% picture-perfect track record with title sales. Not every PS2 game sold what was needed. Not every PS1 game. Not every SNES game. That is the market. Just because your in first place doesn't mean you won't have issues.

My opinion: The Conduit bombed in America and Europe for the first 2 weeks. It may show legs, and if it's a good game, I hope it does. However, to look at ~125,000 sales for 2 major areas for the timeframe we see, and calling it 'good' is nothing short of a mockery of the analytics provided by this website. If I were to take any other 80%+ PS3/X360 game, and put them in a similar situation for sales, I would be laughed at if I didn't call it anything other than a bomb.

After reading the whole thread, I reach the end and... I don't know if I read it well... I'll probably have to go through all of it again, since I don't see anyone saying what you spent 5 paragraphs talking about...



     

 

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sinha on 17 July 2009
Kenology said:
But no way is 71k a good figure for two weeks. I don't know what happened with this game. The smear campaign didn't help things either. It really is a good game.

 

The "smear campaign" didn't help? What smear campaign? Is that a Coinduit-style conspiracy theory?

What didn't help was all those Conduit commercials we were bombarded with on TV, claiming this was "one of the best Wii titles of the year" and "the best first person shooter" (LOL) with "truly magnificent online multiplayer"...

 



We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai

It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps

We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick

 

salaminizer on 17 July 2009
largedarryl said:
For some reason these numbers seem very strange. I'm not denying the poor sales, but I had thought it would end up higher. Almost every store in my city was sold out of The Conduit last week, so I had assumed it would have done better.

And @everyone, the only official numbers that exist are from Sega (not NPD, VGchartz or any other tracking firm).

well, last week wasn't included in June sales :P

I guess killing aliens and conspirations doesn't appeal as much as killing nazis and Yakuzas.



the words above were backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

mrstickball on 17 July 2009
Words Of Wisdom said:
mrstickball said:
Agreeing with a lot of realilists in this thread.

The Conduits sales are atrocious for the first 2 weeks. If you want to argue that one of the biggest exclusive FPSes launching at <100k in 2 weeks is 'good', then feel free to. But don't mind me calling you crazy for it.

The Wii base here is ravenous. No More Heroes didn't bomb. Madworld didn't bomb. Zak & Wiki didn't bomb. In fact, no Wii game has ever bombed. 100% of Wii titles have sold perfectly fine, while it's totally reasonable to call out games like Bionic Commando, Haze, or Too Human as being failures. This seems to be the logic of many Wii fans here.

I think people need to wake up and smell the coffee. No system is perfect in what it can sell. The X360 has it's turds, as does the PS3. Just because the Wii is leading the market doesn't mean that it has a 100% picture-perfect track record with title sales. Not every PS2 game sold what was needed. Not every PS1 game. Not every SNES game. That is the market. Just because your in first place doesn't mean you won't have issues.

My opinion: The Conduit bombed in America and Europe for the first 2 weeks. It may show legs, and if it's a good game, I hope it does. However, to look at ~125,000 sales for 2 major areas for the timeframe we see, and calling it 'good' is nothing short of a mockery of the analytics provided by this website. If I were to take any other 80%+ PS3/X360 game, and put them in a similar situation for sales, I would be laughed at if I didn't call it anything other than a bomb.

I think only one person in this entire thread has implied that 70k was acceptible and that was only with the "it will continue selling for a long time" qualifier by mentioning legs.  And no one has specifically said the sales were "good."

How about reading the thread before writing your minirant next time, hm?

Most people in this thread are astonished not only at how low the sales are but how freakishly vgChartz appears to have overtracked them.

Torillian 'Sounds difficult to believe. I'd have to wait for a more reliable source. No disrespect to this poster, but it just seems like a strangely low number.'

Scottie 'Ahh NPD, always being wrong'

patjuan32 'Dude, you do not even know if the game flopped. NPD only release the top 20. No other site has confirmed the sale figures reported in the OP. The wise move is to take those numbers as if the are grains of salt. Secondly to be in the top 20, the conduit would have to sale more than 193,000 units. VGChartz did not have the game selling that many units.'

alfredofroylan 'I'm going to take this with a grain of salt. The original source took the numbers down and one of the things that catched my attenttion was the gap between the number 6 and 7 of the Wii list (wii play and the conduit) more than 70k, that's a quite big gap.'

Chizrum '
It does not mean The Conduit bombed yet. But it does mean that VGChartz has a big problem with tracking software. They constantly overtrack hyped Wii games and undertrack 360 games. This may be a coincidence or not.'

GianCarmen 'Why is everyone calling The Conduit a Bomb. Really, its only been out for 9 days and it was counted for those days. Stop saying that it flopped, lets wait for a month to see how it has done. Some of you are really beating it up for only 9 days of sales. That $hit needs to stop.'

That's at least 6 people that are having toruble accepting the numbers. Not because it's NPD, but because they either think the Conduit had to do better, or arguing that the sales numbers, if accepted, are irrelevant. I consider both sides of the argument to be from the 'I refuse to admit the Conduit did poorly' camp.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

sinha on 17 July 2009
salaminizer said:

I guess killing aliens and conspirations doesn't appeal as much as killing nazis and Yakuzas.

 

Right, gamers do not enjoy killing aliens, just look at the poor sales for the Halo franchise.....



We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai

It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps

We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick

 

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Kenology on 17 July 2009
sinha said:
Kenology said:
But no way is 71k a good figure for two weeks. I don't know what happened with this game. The smear campaign didn't help things either. It really is a good game.

 

The "smear campaign" didn't help? What smear campaign?

What didn't help was all those Conduit commercials we were bombarded with on TV, claiming this was "one of the best Wii titles of the year" and "the best first person shooter" (LOL) with "truly magnificent online multiplayer"...

The same one that was launched against Wii Music last year.  But that didn't go so well... lol!



JEDE3 on 17 July 2009

If PR doesn't regularly brag about game sales then VGC has a hard time tracking. Remember year end NPD numbers? VGC almost overtracked every title unless the game was A. PR kept sales figures up to date. or B. a fall release.

That's why I don't like using VGC sw sales. They have a hard time tracking it. They always have. They always will.

People saying NPD can be wrong too. That is true but the bigger tracking area would help better for legs. Thus NPD > VGC but official shipment numbers > NPD.



Video_Game_Critic on 17 July 2009

Here is an article from USA Today.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2009/07/68494738/1
This is the reason Infinity Ward will not make a copy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the Wii. If Wii owners want quality FPSs for the Wii, they need to support developers.

EDIT:

Link has been repaired.



tyig on 17 July 2009

People are doubting NPD, even saying it's "suspect", come on.



But war... war never changes

famousringo on 17 July 2009
Ail said:
And that is why more third parties are not doing TV adds for Wii games.

The sales bump provided by the tv adds won't even cover the cost of those adds........

I think it depends on the ads and the product you're selling. Ads seem to have done very well for games like EA Sports Active and Carnival Games. I agree, Sega certainly hasn't seen much response from their ads lately.

And I'll once again caution people about jumping to conclusions (as I always do, and they jump anyway, because they want to). 70k is a pretty tepid launch, to be certain, but it's also exactly on par with the first two weeks of the last million-selling FPS on Wii. Come back and cry flop in a couple months, if you must.



"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event."  — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.