All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2024 edition]

[Completelu Average]

Actually Avowed is almost AAA quality on a AA budget. It's quite good once you get into it.

You may have that opinion and that is fine, but it's no where near actual AAA quality. AAA games don't get "mostly positive" reviews on Steam and an 81 on Metacritic with 6.9 player review scores.

Even IGN gave it a 7. And they gave Veilguard a 9.

I'm not going waste time ripping the game, but by all reasonable accounts it's very "mid". Not horrible, not something I would wish people to lose their jobs over, but nothing special either. A solid B game.


As for AAA budget... THERE IS NONE!

PERIOD

AAA quality has NOTHING to do with developmental costs. NOTHING AT ALL.

You ever hear about a game called Stardew Valley? HUGE hit. Scores high in all the reviews. 41 MILLION copies sold.

Development costs less than $100k.

You going to tell me that's not an AAA game because it didn't cost enough to make?

That kind of thinking is precisely what is wrong with the gaming industry today. An expensive turd is still a turd. It's not suddenly AAA quality because it's expensive.

 

[Completelu Average]

And for the record, Black Myth: Wukong cost $43 Million to make and was Game of the Year. Guess it's not AAA while the $200+ Million LOSING Star Wars Outlaws is AAAA, right?

Budget never has anything to do with a game being AAA or not.

 

[Charlietus]

And for the record, Black Myth: Wukong cost $43 Million to make and was Game of the Year. Guess it's not AAA while the $200+ Million LOSING Star Wars Outlaws is AAAA, right?

Budget never has anything to do with a game being AAA or not.

BMW was game of the year? Must have missed that.

And having such a big difference in wages between regions of the world makes categorizing games by budget kind of irrelevant.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

You may have that opinion and that is fine, but it's no where near actual AAA quality. AAA games don't get "mostly positive" reviews on Steam and an 81 on Metacritic with 6.9 player review scores.

Actually, 81 is the very definition of almost AAA. You're letting your own personal tastes cloud your analysis.

Even IGN gave it a 7. And they gave Veilguard a 9.

Silly to cherry pick one review outlet.

I'm not going waste time ripping the game, but by all reasonable accounts it's very "mid". Not horrible, not something I would wish people to lose their jobs over, but nothing special either. A solid B game.

81 is not a B.

As for AAA budget... THERE IS NONE!

PERIOD

AAA quality has NOTHING to do with developmental costs. NOTHING AT ALL.

You ever hear about a game called Stardew Valley? HUGE hit. Scores high in all the reviews. 41 MILLION copies sold.

Development costs less than $100k.

You going to tell me that's not an AAA game because it didn't cost enough to make?

That kind of thinking is precisely what is wrong with the gaming industry today. An expensive turd is still a turd. It's not suddenly AAA quality because it's expensive.

There are AAA quality games and AAA budget games. Theses are often related, but not always.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As for AAA budget... THERE IS NONE!

That's exactly where the definition of AAA came from.

PERIOD

Don't shout.

AAA quality has NOTHING to do with developmental costs.

You ever hear about a game called Stardew Valley? HUGE hit. Scores high in all the reviews. 41 MILLION copies sold.

And not a AAA game by conventional definitions. A AAA game can be a poor game, and an indie can be great. AAA has never been used to describe the 'best' games but the most expensive, expansive, highest production value games (as a marketing means to imply they are better games).

You going to tell me that's not an AAA game because it didn't cost enough to make?

Yes. You can't go changing definitions to fit your own language. If you want to talk about highly rated games and there isn't a term that means that, just talk about highly rated games.

Wiki:

In the video game industry, AAA (Triple-A) is a buzzword used to classify video games produced or distributed by a mid-sized or major publisher, which typically have higher development and marketing budgets than other tiers of games.

The term "AAA" began to be used in the late 1990s by game retailers attempting to gauge interest in upcoming titles,[2] and first appeared in print in a press release from Infogrames in June 2000.[3] The term was likely borrowed from the credit industry's bond ratings, where "AAA" bonds represent the safest investment opportunity and are the most likely to meet their financial goals.[4]

"AAA" is used in this industry to talk about size of games. If you want to talk about quality, just say "high quality games" and quote metascores or whatever. Certainly don't shout at people because you're using language differently to them.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

81 is not a B.

Such subjective scores and labels are useless to discussion. One person's B is another's A*, not least because those grades are cultural - some school systems will award a B at 50% and other at 85%. To avoid a derailment into a discussion defining the meanings of a 'B grade', let's drop ill-defined terms and use metrics and expressed ideas everyone agrees with. What is it about the game(s) that is relevant to the discussion - sales, critical praise, awards, budget, time-to-market - and how did the game(s) fair on those points?

 

[Sonic]

I still maintain that GTA games are AAAA.

And in other news PS5 Pro has lower sales than PS4 Pro at the same point since it launched. At least in the US. Not totally surprising given the high cost and the lackluster support, after the initial good support, from Sony overall. Maybe they'll be able to drop the price of both the base and pro models to reach a higher user base.

PS5 Pro sales "fall behind" PS4 Pro's "pace" in the US

The pace of PS5 Pro US sales has "fallen behind" that of the PS4 Pro.

www.eurogamer.net

 

[see colon]

And in other news PS5 Pro has lower sales than PS4 Pro at the same point since it launched. At least in the US. Not totally surprising given the high cost and the lackluster support, after the initial good support, from Sony overall. Maybe they'll be able to drop the price of both the base and pro models to reach a higher user base.

I maintain that PS5 Pro didn't have a problem to solve like PS4 Pro did. With 4 Pro, there was an immediate quality difference when hooked up to a 4k TV. There isn't the same obvious quality increase with 5 Pro.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Even if there was an obvious problem to solve, the higher price would have still pretty much guaranteed lower sales.

 

[see colon]

Even if there was an obvious problem to solve, the higher price would have still pretty much guaranteed lower sales.

Any price can be justified if it solves a problem, though. A high price without a justifiable purpose is much harder to justify.

 

[iroboto]

Any price can be justified if it solves a problem, though. A high price without a justifiable purpose is much harder to justify.

I agree with both of you, but at the core of it, it plays the same games, but slightly better. Ps5Pro would have to do something dramatically different, and usually that does not happen until a new generation of console is announced. Even then there’s still quite a large population of ps4 players out there that have not moved over.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Any price can be justified if it solves a problem, though. A high price without a justifiable purpose is much harder to justify.

A higher price will eliminate a proportion of consumers regardless how much they want it because they just can't afford it. Doesn't matter what the value is, PS5Pro is coming from the 'entertainment' budget of a household. If it is to sell well beyond what people would pay for a their entertainment device, it'd have to gain value into other territory.

eg. no-one would be without their mobile phone these days, and people will spend maybe $1000 on one. Well, an early mobile phone maybe cost $1000, and at that price they weren't at all popular. Sure, portable communication would be valued, but there a basic bottom price people won't spend above for it (based on their wealth). Hence phones at this price sold in limited numbers. However, modern $1000 phones can sell millions because they've become something so much more as a portable computing device, apps, money, camera, etc.

A $1000 console just won't sell. It'd have to become far more than a console to be a mainstream product at that price and sell many millions.