All purpose sales and sales rumors/anecdotes thread next gen+

[dobwal]

Plus you get weeks and weeks of (presumably good) holiday sales. Halo 5 as an example may be off to an underwhelming start, but it still has several weeks of lucrative selling ahead before Christmas. Same to all other games launched in October/November.

Halo 3 sold 8.1 million from its release to the end of the holiday period while selling 3.3 million over its first 12 days. So the holidays can definitely provide a boost.

 

[dobwal]

Halo is just an aging franchise. New gamers did not grow up with it and don't have the nostalgia. This leaves hard core Halo fans to sustain the franchise, but even they are growing older and moving on. Too many other games to compete with too; COD, Battlefield, Battlefront, PvZ, Destiny, etc.

The complicated lore, weapons, enemies, etc. all work against new players - maybe a reboot is in order? Maybe a prequel that goes back to the beginning?

More like its an aging genre. Linear first person shooters aren't the rage as they were a few short years ago. Open world or hybrids titles seem to be the most relevant genre now.

 

[Prophecy2k]

More like its an aging genre. Linear first person shooters aren't the rage as they were a few short years ago. Open world or hybrids titles seem to be the most relevant genre now.

COD still manages to sell >20 million copis a pop

 

[London Geezer]

Halo was a launch title on the original Xbox. Maybe we forget that that was many, many years ago.

Can you name a launch title on PS2 still racking in the numbers Halo is/isn't?

Do we even remember any launch games from that generation?

Ageing is an understatement.

 

[Clukos]

If every game turns to open world i am legit going to stop playing most of the games, i am already having trouble keeping up with most AAA titles this year. Not every game has to be open world.

 

[dobwal]

COD still manages to sell >20 million copis a pop

Not as the top selling franchise every year anymore.

 

[dobwal]

If every game turns to open world i am legit going to stop playing most of the games, i am already having trouble keeping up with most AAA titles this year. Not every game has to be open world.

They won't. A linear FPS is far easy to develop then a huge open world title and yet we haven't all been here strictly playing halo and COD derivatives over the last 5-10 years.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Tomb Raider launched in March against basically nothing. This is a pretty crowded November, and gaming dollars are limited. Hopefully it has holiday legs, which I expect it will, but I'm not sure it was ever going to be a smash hit.

 

[rokkerkory]

+1 for TR sales this month, thanks to meee

 

[Prophecy2k]

Not as the top selling franchise every year anymore.

It pretty much is... with the only exception being the years when a new GTA releases.

There aren't any games on XB/PS I can think of, outside of GTA, that outsell COD. What are you thinking of?

BF is a 10m+ per iteration franchise.
Assasin's Creed is a 10m+ per iteration franchise.
Fallout/Elder Scrolls is a 10m+ per iteration franchise.
???
COD is a 20m+ per iteration franchise.

Only GTA is a 30-40m+ per iteration franchise.

What else is more popular than COD, other than GTA?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Skyrim had sold 20m by 2013 so has likely sold more given it's now dirt cheap. I double dipped and bought it on Steam last year.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Cheers DSoup.

Still, I'd argue that as long as COD continues to sell +20 copies a piece, and BF continues to do similar numbers, then we're not going to see a situation where publishers start dropping non-open world games.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Yeah, Bethesda games are often slow burners - well they'll sell a ton up front then as much again over the next couple of years. Do you remember when RPGs were tiny niche markets? Now look at Skyrim, Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. Crazy. Arguably though RPGs have made themselves more accessible for the mass market.

 

[DieH@rd]

Confirmation that Battlefront has sold best on PS4
http://swbstats.com/

Currently online players
PC: 37,302 (24h peak: 49,871)
XBOXONE: 109,466 (24h peak: 110,817)
PS4: 171,395 (24h peak: 187,286)
Total: 318,163

 

[Rangers]

That should surprise exactly no one...

Even aside PS4 having a 2:1 worlwide install base lead, the Battlefield games seemed more popular on Playstation than Xbox historically.

If that's a worldwide figure it actually suggest Xbox is overperforming, but then again we saw with bfstats that time of day plays into it, Xbox may decline greatly when the USA is asleep. The 24 hr peaks suggest an Xbox overperform though.

Ouch at PC. Cant blame PC digital sales for that discrepancy...

Fallout had around 500k concurrent players just on Steam at one point IIRC, completely ignoring consoles or non steam PC, although I dont remember when in relation to it's release that was. This has 312k currently across all plats if that site is to be believed...

 

[DrJay24]

I'm not sure you can know that from this data. 24 hour peak is not the number of players that played in 24 hours, but the max number at any given time in 24 hours. Having a large part of your user base in three times zones is going to help the XB1. Sony is distributed more equally around the globe.

The peaks could look something like this:
XB1 110k NA / 30k EU
PS4 170k NA / 110k EU

 

[Clukos]

Confirmation that Battlefront has sold best on PS4
http://swbstats.com/

Currently online players
PC: 37,302 (24h peak: 49,871)
XBOXONE: 109,466 (24h peak: 110,817)
PS4: 171,395 (24h peak: 187,286)
Total: 318,163

PC and X1 combined? That's impressive.

 

[temesgen]

That should surprise exactly no one...

Even aside PS4 having a 2:1 worlwide install base lead, the Battlefield games seemed more popular on Playstation than Xbox historically.

If that's a worldwide figure it actually suggest Xbox is overperforming, but then again we saw with bfstats that time of day plays into it, Xbox may decline greatly when the USA is asleep. The 24 hr peaks suggest an Xbox overperform though.

Ouch at PC. Cant blame PC digital sales for that discrepancy...

Fallout had around 500k concurrent players just on Steam at one point IIRC, completely ignoring consoles or non steam PC, although I dont remember when in relation to it's release that was. This has 312k currently across all plats if that site is to be believed...

Certainly does raise some questions about the number and quality of AAA PC titles that would be available if consoles were not there to help justify the investment for developers.... It would be interesting to try and figure out what the lifetime sales of software are for PC versus console for various IPs and genres; I would guess that PC has a much longer tail than console and perhaps over the long run the sales start to even out a bit but my hunch is the justification of modern gaming budgets comes from the sales over the first few weeks which in some ways perhaps is similar to the movie industry. I'm just speculating though and could be completely wrong.

 

[Clukos]

Don't worry, according to many people here, if it wasn't for consoles we'd see 10 original Crysis AAA tier games released on PC every year. Clearly everyone involved in the games industry would move to the more warm and friendly PC crowd (see /r/pcmasterrace) and console exclusives would be released on PC instead.

Spoiler

Just kidding, mobiles would be king, consoles are barely making sense anymore financially (see annual updates, DLC plans, microtransactions and the list goes on)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Let's not have that discussion here. It's been had elsewhere.