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[LotusHD]

Yes, I am pissed that Sony abandoned the Vita and moved everything to PS4, even though I own a PS4 since launch.

Ohhh yea lol, now I remember lol:

Such a PS4 sequel would have bombed even harder without the critical praise.

Also, this is a sales thread so I am discussing whether the decision made sense sales wise, which it didn't in my opinion.
If I want to discuss the greatness and uniqueness of the game, I would enter the review thread.

And I am so grateful that Shu the Sony god blessed me with GR1 on Vita, I deserve nothing for buying their platform. I am sure that Gravity Rush PS3 would have been the game of the generation if it would not have been moved to us dirty Vita peasants. Just like the other best selling SCEJ games that are not named Gran Turismo.

Well, no point in arguing this all over again, so carry on I guess.

Must be shit on niche games day or something really weird

Nier's next.

 

[BriareosGAF]

I was at MSFT in the labs with our account manager reading through the thread while waiting for a build to finish. "How does it feel to be the number one publisher on Wii U?" "Yeah, it's... interesting." Heard some fun stories about render guys working on custom texture filtering setups in the PS to retain the specific blocky look but provide some improved filtering on Minecraft. Reminded me of some mistakes we made back in the early PS3/X360 days with a customized compression approach we took on SM3, but they have the GPU headroom for that to be successful now.

 

[Primethius]

You can't sweep all Japanese exclusives under the rug.

Bloodborne, Kingdom Hearts, and apparently NiOh (February) have done pretty well, and I'm sure Persona 5 will too.

Capcom going platform exclusive with Dead Rising and Street Fighter was obviously a mistake, unless the money given to them by MS and Sony offset the loss of revenue. Of course, with the decisions made to the fundamental package offered by those titles, it's hard to argue they would've done significantly better with more exposure.

These recent flops indicate that Shenmue 3 is probably not going to set the world on fire.

It's not about sweeping anything under the rug. For some titles, the sales were fairly set in stone.

No one should be expecting Yakuza to do big numbers. It comes to NA due to fan demand, not because of actual sales numbers. That's why every Yakuza localization announcement is so exciting. Because from a sales perspective, Sega is totally in the right to never localize another game again and that's been true for some time (thanks Sega).

GR2 didn't sell well. No one should be denying that. But that's also part of what Sony's done for some time. They greenlight games that don't sell but are generally loved by the fans.

Like... ICO might be considered a masterpiece but it didn't sell well at all. SOTC was an increase over it but again, not exactly a big seller. TLG was an increase over that and again, not a big seller.

It's not really a justification for the sales so much as the mindset. I'd be more concerned about GR2 bombing if the guy who made the game wasn't already working on something else for Sony.

 

[Murdamonk]

lol @ yakuza & gr2

theres over 50 million ps4s out there and they didnt even chart

You do know that NPD is for US sales, right?

 

[onemanasylum]

lol @ yakuza & gr2

theres over 50 million ps4s out there and they didnt even chart

What's so funny? Not every game will appeal to the masses who are happy to play COD 15 instead. There is a world outside the US though luckily.

 

[kswiston]

You do know that NPD is for US sales, right?

They didn't chart on PS4 alone, so install bases are irrelevant.

 

[Y2Kev]

I kind of understand why Vita fans feel slighted but I think anyone who feels slighted at this juncture probably needed to let it go like four years ago. It's like people who still think memory card prices did the system in.

 

[zelas]

At least fans enjoyed it? You're making it sound like they shouldn't have made this game; I'm glad they did.

From a business perspective, if they're not able to recoup their budget then they shouldn't have made the game.

Even if they did it mostly to foster some good will what good has that done? A game more niche than Yakuza leaves that gesture largely unnoticed/unappreciated by even most hardcore fans, let alone the larger market. And there's just not enough GR fans to make word of mouth evangelism effective. Especially when those fans have to overcome the fact that many people played the demo and were definitevly turned off by the gameplay or later several reviewers speaking negativley of the quests.

Edit - This isnt to say I have a problem with niche games or that they should never get a green light. Just that there's a spectrum of niche titles and publishers should think twice before creating sequels to games that are unlikely to crack reach 100-200k vs a Tales/Kingdom Hearts/Team Ico/etc game.

 

[chromatic9]

Nioh will be in the top 10 PlayStation games and might even get around 8th-10th on the all formats. BB did really well in the US.

Would be interesting to get GR2 and Yakuza numbers, might be closer to a single EU country than you'd think.

 

[cheesekao]

From a business perspective, if they're not able to recoup their budget then they shouldn't have made the game.

Even if they did it mostly to foster some good will what good has that done? A game more niche than Yakuza leaves that gesture largely unnoticed/unappreciated by even most hardcore fans, let alone the larger market. And there's just not enough GR fans to make word of mouth evangelism effective. Especially when those fans have to overcome the fact that many people played the demo and were definitevly turned off by the gameplay or later several reviewers speaking negativley of the quests.

Edit - This isnt to say I have a problem with niche games or that they should never get a green light. Just that there's a spectrum of niche titles and publishers should think twice before creating sequels to games that are unlikely to crack reach 100-200k vs a Tales/Kingdom Hearts/Team Ico/etc game.

Japan Studios is probably the most immune to closure so it doesn't really even matter. They have made plenty of niche ass titles that didn't sell well or only sold well in Japan. It's one of Sony's more experimental studios alongside Media Molecule.

 

[Ingeniero]

GTA V still at number 3...

Why? It's a great game and deserves all those sells.

 

[Past]

I don't even think Sega produced enough copies for Yakuza 0 to chart in the top 10. Only The Business Edition was available in NA and it sold out almost everywhere in a couple days. You couldn't even get a copy on Amazon until like a week ago.

 

[Unknown?]

Nioh will be in the top 10 PlayStation games and might even get around 8th-10th on the all formats. BB did really well in the US.

Would be interesting to get GR2 and Yakuza numbers, might be closer to a single EU country than you'd think.

Dude... NiOh was undershipped. Unless they quickly restocked it isn't even going to chart on PS4 individual list.

 

[zelas]

Japan Studios is probably the most immune to closure so it doesn't really even matter. They have made plenty of niche ass titles that didn't sell well or only sold well in Japan. It's one of Sony's more experimental studios alongside Media Molecule.

It matters in the sense that they could have been doing something regarded more productive to more people. We could have had Knack 2 a lot sooner.

 

[Liabe Brave]

Reminded me of some mistakes we made back in the early PS3/X360 days with a customized compression approach we took on SM3, but they have the GPU headroom for that to be successful now.

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with your development history. What studio was "SM"? It's interesting hearing about metalevel technical approaches like this. I'm too uneducated to follow the minutiae of engineering, but the logic of overall strategies is vague enough to understand and can be fascinating.

 

[BriareosGAF]

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with your development history. What studio was "SM"? It's interesting hearing about metalevel technical approaches like this. I'm too uneducated to follow the minutiae of engineering, but the logic of overall strategies is vague enough to understand and can be fascinating.

This was Spider-Man 3. We had developed a novel compression schema for texture data across the diffuse/normal/etc. maps, but it was palettized and involved manually fetching texels to perform filtering, which is enormously expensive on a per-pixel basis and a waste of the fixed function texture filtering hardware. It was eventually removed and did not ship.

If I understood my colleague correctly, Minecraft has a specific aesthetic in the texture filtering related to the low-texel count look of the blocks, but they want the actual on-screen display to look nicely filtered, and this results in them doing similar manual fetch/filter tricks to pull that off.

 

[MatPiscatella]

From a business perspective, if they're not able to recoup their budget then they shouldn't have made the game.

Even if they did it mostly to foster some good will what good has that done? A game more niche than Yakuza leaves that gesture largely unnoticed/unappreciated by even most hardcore fans, let alone the larger market... there's a spectrum of niche titles and publishers should think twice before creating sequels to games that are unlikely to crack reach 100-200k vs a Tales/Kingdom Hearts/Team Ico/etc game.

There's a real fine line between trying to turn a profit on every game (by reducing risk and putting out fewer core niche titles) and trying to maintain a library that keeps people interested in the platform.

It's up to the 1st parties to take on the more risky/niche development to widen the appeal of the console. Sometimes those games don't make money, but they do make the platform as a whole more vibrant/viable.

If a platform settles to only cater to those games which are blockbuster focused, the risk is that the appeal of the console could be limited overall.

My take at least.

Neogaf sold out ... NPD threads completely neutered. Victory for massive publishers, massive loss for the average gamer.

Do go on...

 

[On Demand]

Neogaf sold out ... NPD threads completely neutered. Victory for massive publishers, massive loss for the average gamer.

It's why i called these charts pointless. Still today after the new change (again) people refer to these charts as actual sales. One poster even tried to compare the old combined units format to this new revenue format when trying to prove a game that didn't chart before, now has. Can't do that as they're two completely different charts.

Another thing is discussing what "sold more" or "sold less" with 0 sales context. Epecially now when nothing in these charts are from actual units sold. At least with the combined format we knew what sold more/less in comparison to something else. It had no data, but it was somewhat more useful. Yeah it's nice seeing your favorite game chart (or not) but we're only seeing half the picture. More than half. The added PR bullshit doesn't make it any more useful.

I guess this was the point. How do we hide more info that was already hidden before? At the same time pretty up the charts for developers and publishers and feed the public a facsimile of the original NPD data that doesn't tell us what's actually going on.


I'm done here.

 

[Nyoro SF]

There's a real fine line between trying to turn a profit on every game (by reducing risk and putting out fewer core niche titles) and trying to maintain a library that keeps people interested in the platform.

It's up to the 1st parties to take on the more risky/niche development to widen the appeal of the console. Sometimes those games don't make money, but they do make the platform as a whole more vibrant/viable.

If a platform settles to only cater to those games which are blockbuster focused, the risk is that the appeal of the console could be limited overall.

My take at least.

This is the side of equation that a lot of people miss... library mindshare is very important.

 

[donny2112]

Spoiler

And as we get farther and farther away from the days of actual data, the knowledgeable posters who knew what to look for and how to interpret data slowly fade away. Remember that ZhugeEX was a regular poster who used the data to generate useful trends and conclusions, because it was data he cared about. He got so good at it that it led to a full-time job with the same kind of analysis. That situation isn't likely to repeat nowadays in NPD threads. This isn't a passing of the guard, as no one wants to guard data that they don't care about. Why would someone track unevenly generated revenue data of games at vastly different price tiers? ioi wouldn't even try to make something useful out of that (would he? :lol).

Le sigh.

I'm an old fogey waxing nostalgic for days when compiling thousands of games with changing titles each month into coherent totals and trends was a labor of love. The love is still there, but the days aren't.

Loved. Wanted. Needed.

/oldfogey

Hey, guys! February is always way up, so maybe Microsoft will share some real sales next month!

 

[Mooreberg]

Strong showing by RE7. First person horror markets itself on the streaming sites. I wonder if the free content coming in the spring will keep it in the spotlight a little longer.

GR2 and Yakuza 0 could have used better release dates. But it sounds like Y0 did what it needed to for what is basically a subtitle job. This year is off to a great start for software releases, if not for how to position them to succeed.