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NPD November 2011 Sales Results [Update 7: Skyrim, CoD Wii, PC Retail Sales Up 57%]
- Thread starter Road
- Start date
Sho_Nuff82
Member
Assassin's Creed sells consistently because its iterating on a solid, entertaining formula, the difficulty is balanced enough that just about anyone can beat it with enough persistence, and it still has zero competition. There's nothing like it on the market, not in the way that SR3/GTA 5/LA Noire/Mafia 2/RDR would compete with one another.
Still, now that the franchise isn't really growing, they have to either change up the formula for AC3 or take a few years off because they might risk dipping out of the top-tier bracket during the console transition.
Yes, a 2D platformer can be sold at $60 in the literal sense. Much like a sequel to Rez can be sold at $50. Whether or not it is a good idea is what's up for debate at the moment.
I think we can all agree looking at the results that releasing the game at $60 on the same day as Assassin's Creed was a terrible, terrible, misreading of the market. I think even $20 on XBLA/Steam/PSN would have been more reasonable, and it would have sold well over 200k in a similar timespan. Rayman is not an IP that means anything to the PS360 crowd at all, it's hard to justify the move to retail.
They were probably banking on the NSMB Wii crowd (or even the DKCR crowd) being desperate for another platformer, but NoA's lol-worthy release schedule probably convinced the last of Nintendo's die-hards to go full HD upgrade this year. And as charlequin has pointed out, expanded audience gamers don't seem to really give a crap about buying new games except for Just Dance and Zumba Fitness for the past year.
Still, now that the franchise isn't really growing, they have to either change up the formula for AC3 or take a few years off because they might risk dipping out of the top-tier bracket during the console transition.
Yes, a 2D platformer can be sold at $60 in the literal sense. Much like a sequel to Rez can be sold at $50. Whether or not it is a good idea is what's up for debate at the moment.
I think we can all agree looking at the results that releasing the game at $60 on the same day as Assassin's Creed was a terrible, terrible, misreading of the market. I think even $20 on XBLA/Steam/PSN would have been more reasonable, and it would have sold well over 200k in a similar timespan. Rayman is not an IP that means anything to the PS360 crowd at all, it's hard to justify the move to retail.
They were probably banking on the NSMB Wii crowd (or even the DKCR crowd) being desperate for another platformer, but NoA's lol-worthy release schedule probably convinced the last of Nintendo's die-hards to go full HD upgrade this year. And as charlequin has pointed out, expanded audience gamers don't seem to really give a crap about buying new games except for Just Dance and Zumba Fitness for the past year.
those did well over time actually. each one sold better than the ps3 or 360 versions of sonic unleashed.
sonic the hedgehog 06 did really well over time too, though, but it looks like the fanbase didn't stick around on those consoles for whatever reason.
Ugh, GAF is running so horribly now.
Uhh, depends on how you personally define well. Doing better than the PS3/360 version of Unleashed isn't saying much at all. After Sonic '06, that probably became as jaded as can be anyway.
I do think that it was dumb of Sega to leave the Nintendo faithful out of their big anniversary (it was on 3DS though, but it's not like everyone has one of those yet). But making Sonic exclusive in hopes that will magically increase sales would be just as stupid. He should simply be multiplatform.
Uhh, depends on how you personally define well. Doing better than the PS3/360 version of Unleashed isn't saying much at all. After Sonic '06, that probably became as jaded as can be anyway.
I do think that it was dumb of Sega to leave the Nintendo faithful out of their big anniversary (it was on 3DS though, but it's not like everyone has one of those yet). But making Sonic exclusive in hopes that will magically increase sales would be just as stupid. He should simply be multiplatform.
frankie_baby
Member
i notice you dont mention secret rings or colours
DefectiveReject
Banned
professor_t
Member
Where did you learn that Steam has a higher profit margin compared to XBLA? I'm curious.
Can you really blame gamers? I blame Ubisoft. I don't think any of my friends even know the game exists.
Okay? It's not like I said every exclusive Sonic game bombs.
But neither of those light up the NPD charts during their opening month either.
True. I would throw those in as exceptions along with Mario, I suppose.
Yeah, but Steam would've also been $40-$50 too. Buying it on sale on Steam is the same as, well.. everyone else that's waiting for the retail versions to go on sale... permanently, since the game has been on sale already.
Many had the idea that Rayman Origins is just an Xbox Live Arcade game that was put on a disc and sold for $50. When in general, well noone knows. All that was said was that after it originally been a digital release, they were adding more and more stuff; which was why they ended going retail.
Neuromancer
Member
Give us cold hard numbers for Saints Row, THQ!
bigtroyjon
Member
Really mismanaged or poorly planned game, should have budgeted it for $15 Live/PSN/PC release and made the game according to that budget.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
The game isn't high budget, the team is relatively small.
It probably only needs to sell a few hundred thousand to break even at full price, but the lukewarm start everywhere makes even that modest goal doubtful.
charlequin
Banned
Yeah, I make that distinction because it's a real actual distinction, and one that exists (to varying degrees) in almost all fields of commerce.
This is the economic equivalent of the "well actually everything people do is motivated by selfishness when you drill down far enough!" argument in philosophy, and equivalently specious. Yes, on the most reductionist level, people buy things to fulfill needs. However, on the levels that actual behavior happen, those needs and their realizations vary wildly, especially between goal-oriented needs and product-oriented needs.
This distinction is obvious if you look at any practical product that also features a luxury class. Most people buy cars situationally -- they decide (whether accurately or not) that a car is the most effective solution to the "obtain local transport" problem and invest in a practical device to solve it. People don't buy Lamborghinis situationally. There is no actual problem (except "I am rich as fuck but somehow don't own a Lamborghini yet") that a Lamborghini solves (for a private citizen, at least). It is a pure luxury good whose purpose is solely to be itself: it is a thing people want because of its fundamental nature, not because of what it's good at.
This effect is way stronger in entertainment than it is in packaged goods because aesthetics are functionally divorced from practical considerations. Why does someone rush home every Tuesday night to watch a favorite TV show even when it's going through a rough patch? Or follow a specific favorite band on tour even though the setlist is the same every night? Or stand in line to get opening night tickets for a film that isn't even going to sell out? Is it because they calculate out the net entertainment per minute provided by these things and determine that it's maximal? No, it's because these people are fans of the individual things separate from their practical benefit. The entire concept of genre in every medium is basically predicated on this point -- that people are often more interested in the thing that is of the kind that they like than they are in the thing that is the most directly beneficial in addressing their specific "need."
That's exactly it -- it is basically impossible to use video games to serve these people's entertainment needs reliably, because being a game is a neutral, not positive, quality of a product for this audience. If you don't care about games qua games, Nintendo has no inherent advantage in targeting you compared to Apple, compared to Google, compared to Oprah, compared to any random jackass in the garage with $100, time to burn, and an idea for a great new web service or Facebook app. Nintendo is never going to hit it big with Financial Training (because of Mint.com) or Friend Miitup (because of Foursquare.) The next time they do come up with a great idea that mixes game elements with practical benefits, their business model is still going to handicap them against people operating on cheaper, network-oriented platforms.
The only audience Nintendo has (and has ever had) that is immune to this kind of competition is the audience that cares about games as a thing, the people for whom just the very fact that Mario Kart is a game and not a movie or a novel or a public-facing business downtown already makes it more fundamentally appealing. This has always been Nintendo's core audience, and any sustainable business model for them will always rely on appealing to this market.
(And this is entirely separate from the target-demographics argument. Nintendo is certainly good at picking up demographics -- kids, women, older people -- that are largely ignored by other publishers, and I certainly don't think they should move away from that.)
Either one can interpret this in a meaninglessly vague way ("Nintendo's strategy is to make things people want" -- like, no shit) or you're drilling down enough on it that its limitations become obvious. What Nintendo has available to them is a business in which they can deliver to people discrete software products, sold in a retail context, at prices of $30+, and which require a piece of hardware that costs $100+, after a 1+ year production period. That's a model that has been relentlessly assaulted over the last twenty years by disruptive technologies, to the degree that delivering games is pretty much the only thing it's still good for.
AbsoluteZero
Banned
I doubt steam sales would make up even 10% of the title's total number.
At 60 dollars sure.. but after a couple sales it could make over 10% easy.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Well, even if both services had an equal margin, they had a publisher on XBLA and didn't have a publisher on Steam, so it stands to reason that they made more per dollar on Steam
frankie_baby
Member
dunno about colours really but secret rings was considered a success
Yeah, take the recent release Trine 2. Frozenbyte (developer) self publishes the game on Steam. On XBLA Atlus is the publisher, so they have to share profits.
Not a UBI game, that is for certain. UBI would do something to irritate PC gamers and make them not want to buy the game.
Not a UBI game, that is for certain. UBI would do something to irritate PC gamers and make them not want to buy the game.
I'm not saying launching the game the way Ubisoft did was a great idea. I was just disagreeing with that guy. He's straight up saying "platformers don't deserve to cost $60 in 2011 (because I don't like them)".
Phonomezer
Banned
Also people are forgetting that Rayman was never that popular to begin with.
Neuromancer
Member
Well I bought Rayman, I did my part. It's a wonderful and beautiful looking game. Guess now we're not going to see any retail 2D platformers coming out from any publishers any time soon.
bigtroyjon
Member
Costs more money to publish a worldwide retail release than it does a download game. That's part of the budget.
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
Colors shipped 2 million worldwide it's first quarter on Wii/DS. I sort of doubt Generations does as well considering how previous HD Sonic games sold.
Refreshment.01
Member
Kajima, problem is at first glance Rayman Origins doesn't seem like a 60 dollar game, it looks comparable to those 15 downloadable games. The public has a hard time to figure out the game indeed warrants that monetary investment. This become harder when we look at the catalogue of games released near Rayman launch.Kajima said:
The human race is not worth saving.
farewell ;_; RAYMAN
we won't be seeing brilliant 60fps 1080p rayman platformer by ancel anymore.
Big-ass Ramp
hella bullets that's true
damnit about rayman (((
(((cartman414
Member
Who else is shocked Rayman Origins isn't on PC already? All the other games have had PC ports.
You havent seen the anti pc talk from Ubi lately? They think 90% (cant actually remember the insane number
) of pc users are pirates.You don't know Ubishit very well, do you?
BoobPhysics101
Banned
True that. Even for $20 I would have bought Rayman Origins on Steam in a heartbeat.
nincompoop
Banned
Rayman was the highest selling European PSX game OF ALL TIME. Your post literally could not be further from the truth.
cartman414
Member
You mean that recent "I Am Alive" thing?
That or they won't get so greedy next time at the positive buzz and will keep it as a DD only title. Like they originally intended.
SapientWolf
Trucker Sexologist
Same. I thought 50k was pretty good for a 2D platformer on the HD consoles. Especially considering all the new releases in Oct-Nov.
I wonder how much Sonic Generations did.
StickSoldier
Member
Rayman just came out at a bad time man. They seriously put it out at the worst time they could. I haven't had money to buy it after buying both Mario games, even though I want it. I'll surely have to wait till next year to purchase it.
Yeah, this was 2003 all over again for them. I remember when they had to bundle Sands of Time with Splinter Cell just to get it to sell.
kame-sennin
Member
It's not a reductionist philosophy at all, it's simply a means of segmenting the market. Demographics and product categories are used in the same way. Segmenting the market by the job a given product performs is a logical unit of analysis, and something that has been done quite successfully by executives like Akio Morita, Steve Jobs, and Satoru Iwata. It's also a strategy that is more focused on actual behavior, not less.
Akio Morita, Sony's co-founder, proposed the Walkman after noticing the lengths to which teenagers would go to carry their music around with them. He realized that portable music was an important job and, against the objections of his engineers, designed the Walkman around that. Steve Jobs is also famous for dismissing conventional market research (demographics, product category, and focus groups). The iPod and the iPad were both designed around helping customers perform a job they were struggling to get done - 1,000 songs in your pocket and light internet browsing/media consumption respectively - which is why they defined their respective markets, even though MP3 players and tablets were already on the market. Iwata's job focus has already been discussed.
The points you make about people's favorite bands or buying luxury goods ignore the fact that products and services may also fulfill social and/or emotional needs, as well as functional needs. Showing off one's wealth to others is a job that many people are trying to get done (wisely or not). Luxury brands like Lamborgini or Prada perform those jobs quite well.
With regards to Mario Kart, the emotional attachment lies in the fact that the Mario Kart brand has repeatedly succeeded in delivering arcade, kart racing, multi-player fun, which is a job that some 30 million people apparently value highly. If future installments of the series diverged from this job, sales would drop. The decline would not be immediate, but that is only because the Mario Kart brand is so closely associated with the job. After one or more iterations that failed to deliver, the brand would weaken and the series would collapse. We've seen powerful brands collapse before, and the cause is usually because they fail to perform the job the brand had historically been associated with.
As I said before, I don't see a practical limit on a job-focused strategy with regards to Nintendo. As we see in the Walkman/iPod example, innovation can help uncover inefficiencies in previously well established categories.
I made an offhand reference to comics in my last post. I did so because, as many others have noted, there are many similarities between the comic book industry (particularly during the 1980's) and the video game industry today. Without digressing too much, I will point out that the number of people that care about comics as a thing shrinks every year.
Mario Kart is important to its customers as a game rather than as a film because a film lacks interactivity. A Mario Kart film would do a terrible job of providing arcade multi-player racing fun.
BruceLeeRoy
Banned
Sad about Rayman but I am definitely getting it for Vita. Seems perfect for the platform.
Rush2thestart
Member
Funny you left out Secret Rings and Sonic Colors.
Speaking from a personal perspective, I believe my own game (10-12 hours, full voice acting, fairly challenging experience) has a *value* of about ten dollars. That's what I believed it was worth, and what I would have liked to theoretically charge.
But I didn't. I knew it would be a mistake: no one had heard of us, we're an indie studio, and there are certain psychological barriers regarding the difference between five and ten dollars.
Few people, I think, would argue that Rayman isn't WORTH $50-$60 if they've really played through the majority of the game. But looking at the release schedule, the relative popularity of Rayman, and the perceived value of platformers on platforms like iOS, it simply wasn't a good business decision to release it for that price. Now, Ubisoft and Ancel suffer for it.
But I didn't. I knew it would be a mistake: no one had heard of us, we're an indie studio, and there are certain psychological barriers regarding the difference between five and ten dollars.
Few people, I think, would argue that Rayman isn't WORTH $50-$60 if they've really played through the majority of the game. But looking at the release schedule, the relative popularity of Rayman, and the perceived value of platformers on platforms like iOS, it simply wasn't a good business decision to release it for that price. Now, Ubisoft and Ancel suffer for it.
I have a maybe silly question but let me try.
Sony's PS3 black friday bunddle was pretty much sold out everywhere. So the amouth of PS3 consoles sold during this month was to a certain point a result of BF bundle allocation.
Couldnt Sony allocate more bundles to outsell the 360?
Sony's PS3 black friday bunddle was pretty much sold out everywhere. So the amouth of PS3 consoles sold during this month was to a certain point a result of BF bundle allocation.
Couldnt Sony allocate more bundles to outsell the 360?
AceBandage
Banned
Hardware allocations are a gamble.
Ship too many and you have them sitting around eating money.
Ship too few and you lose possible sales.
They probably could have shipped more (and so could MS, honestly), but they had to make a decision well ahead of time (months, really), and they chose a reasonable number based on research.
Exactly.