Well, I was right about Madworld not doing very well. Little of the buzz was about how excited people were to play it (it was all, "Wow, a 'hardcore' title on Wii, that's great!", and the marketing focused on the violence. I don't think that's been a winning strategy since the original Mortal Kombat games. Most people will take the wrong lesson from this and conclude that hardly anyone on the Wii will play a game involving some kind of action or violence.
NPD March 2009
- Thread starter RobertR1
- Start date
March is no less crowded mind-share wise, and it's honestly the same games more or less vying for attention as above.
IMO, the game should have been launched at Winter in the place of Resistance 2 - to me that would have been a much more logical and synergistic fit marketing wise. Resistance 2 should have been the game coming out in February/March, with a fairly loyal userbase to guarantee a certain number of sales. Something about the themes of each respective game vs their competition in said months just makes more sense to me as well.
I can come up with some reasons why they would have opted for how they ended up doing it as well of course, but in any event it doesn't much matter because it is what it is and we can only really analyze what happened vs trying to think what might have been.
The word of mouth on KZ2 isn't that good actually. It's got a very cookie cutter campaign and MP is a mess. Infact I'd say the SP is a bigger draw than the MP, and that's not saying much. While the graphics are great and can be an initial draw, eventually you want the game to immerse you and it doesn't seem to do a good job of that. However, it's the MP in shooters that seems to be the key for FPS games this generation. The controls, amazing amount of lag, disconnects, lack of party options and such seem to be a contributing a visible decline in the KZ2 online community. Gaf has been following the numbers closely and that seems to be trend on a game that's been out just over a month.
Ofcourse, the people who have been spamming KZ2 gif's and avatars for the past year +, threadcrapping any time the word graphics comes up anywhere on a forum, won't admit to any of this and simply rely on blaming marketing/price of console/etc... All these factors would be easily discarded had the the game been a blockbuster success out of the gates but it's not.
Ofcourse, the people who have been spamming KZ2 gif's and avatars for the past year +, threadcrapping any time the word graphics comes up anywhere on a forum, won't admit to any of this and simply rely on blaming marketing/price of console/etc... All these factors would be easily discarded had the the game been a blockbuster success out of the gates but it's not.
That's silly. If you already have a loyal userbase you'd want to maximize your sales during the biggest time of the year and hope the strong word of mouth from your loyal fanbase convinces others to pick up the game/console since people are psychologically in a buying mood during that period.
I'm sure Sony predicted better R2 sales during the time period. Armchair quarterbacking now, it's easy to say what they should have done but by historical standard, they did the right thing of trying to bank on a sequel to an already popular PS3 game during the biggest purchasing months of the year vs giving KZ2 a shot. It just didn't work out.
Why should they? Motorstorm didn't excactly get amazing reviews (82\100 not that good considering the average game scores 72\100), neither did MS2.
Nothing inclining people to buy the sequel (except for the few that thought the first title was so good they wanted more of the same)
Wasn't resistance1 the only fps game avaliable for quite some time on the PS3?
They should have taken that into account
The game is one of the most immersive I have played, especially SP. Even MP initial levels are great.
The main killers are the advanced soldier classes and the lack of party system. The control for MP is quite alright (Most of the complains are against SP controls). The lag is mainly due to P2P gameplay like many XBL games.
Err.... people have already talked about KZ2 gameplay issues above. ^_^
Honestly I think the reason they did it the way they did was not to capitalize on a successful franchise and word of mouth etc etc (per se), but because they felt it would be a logical progression of "PS3 has shooters, here's a great one here; this one looks good, and now this one looks better!"
See what I mean? At least, that's my best guess into the way they tiered the launches. Of course actual preparedness and state of completion must be floating around in there as well, but I get the feeling either game could have been pushed through to Christmas, and conversely either game could have benefited from slightly more time.
I'm a huge R1 fan - a very specific breed of PS3 owner as we've learned in certain threads - so honestly I just think that KZ2 first and R2 second would have made more sense from a thematic viewpoint. Gears 2 vs KZ2, where Gears will be the big name but KZ2 will be focused on a very similar demographic, just seems like it would have made more sense (IMO) in terms of coinciding mentalities among the gaming public.
You probably should play the game. I don't think KZ2 was -that- good, to be honest, but the problems you mentioned, Gears 2 had them too. They're about equal quality games -- where Gears 2 MP is glitchy, KZ2's is messy.
Again, you should probably play the game. Some of these are true, others not so much.
I'll put this as nicely as I possibly can: GAF tends to overreact. There may be some decline, but don't be so quick to call out a 'trend' on something you have no idea about.
See, when you go to fanboy boards, you tend to deal with fanboys. On well-moderated boards, like this one ( :* ) that sort of behavior will earn you a smack or worse.
I may be the only one who agrees with Asher on the KZ1 stigma. I actually had people tell me 'oh, I don't know about KZ2, KZ1 was just so bad'. And this was after the reviews.
Is R2 fully funded by Sony? Does Insomniac get any say, even if informally, when it comes to release dates?
I thought the lower review scores were due to the lack of on-line which some sites upgraded when it was patched in. Anyway, I thought that it was pretty good if repetitive and hard.
Sony and Insomniac work in very close concert - I'm sure they very much have a say in what happens with their games' releases. And maybe that's all part of it, Insomniac itself might have wanted the Christmas slot, which would make sense.
RobertR1 has played the game. I've had discussions about what he thought of it when I was playing him on SF4.
I've only played the demo, but I was fairly impressed with the graphics, lighting and animation. I thought the overall look was kind of dark for my taste, but after reading the post of people here, it appears to have a bit of a variety not represenative of the demo.
I agree with Carl. In fact I've said Sony should have held KZ2 in the can until November 2009 really (somehow assuming it wasn't done in time for 2008).
But I couldn't tell you what went "wrong" I thought the game did everything right.
If there's one thing that stood out at me, it's the game was heavily, heavily overexposed in the months leading up to release. I've heard it jokingly said the entire game was gif-ed prior to release. There really was a huge lul on GAF right after SF4 came out toward the game. All this hype was pent up and then there was an anti-cimax because the game was still two months away.
However, I have to remind myself what a freak I am, and that most people simply dont spend hours on video game internet forums. It was an issue for me but it wasn't an issue for the masses.
I dont know, we can disect this forever but who really knows. I really think a lot of it boils down to MS captured the really hardcore gamers by being a year early. A true hardcore gamer is going to pick up the first next gen system out regardless. So the real hardcore both in media and elsewhere all picked up 360's early and it still resonates to this day imo, theres a lot of media bias toward the 360 and strangely moreseo in the UK than the USA imo. That and the hardcore are more involved with MS because of Halo and Live. I would say Sony hasnt put enough emphasis on FPS but they have brought out two Resistance games, Socom, and now KZ2, but none have really struck jackpot.
Maybe it's the controller? Honestly I'm a longtime Xbox gamer who recently picked up a PS3 and I really struggle on a fundamental level with the DS3 for FPS. Maybe it's as simple as the controller (this could also explain SF4, but OTOH doesn't explain COD4). Or maybe that's the key, COD4. Maybe they need to bring out American, Xbox style games. COD4 is a quintessential Xbox style, community based game to me. And it's done very well on PS3 also. Maybe MAG will tap that, but my early vibe on MAG isnt good personally.
In the end PS3 is selling about as good as 360 worldwide, so doom and gloom is overselling it until/if that changes.
But I couldn't tell you what went "wrong" I thought the game did everything right.
If there's one thing that stood out at me, it's the game was heavily, heavily overexposed in the months leading up to release. I've heard it jokingly said the entire game was gif-ed prior to release. There really was a huge lul on GAF right after SF4 came out toward the game. All this hype was pent up and then there was an anti-cimax because the game was still two months away.
However, I have to remind myself what a freak I am, and that most people simply dont spend hours on video game internet forums. It was an issue for me but it wasn't an issue for the masses.
I dont know, we can disect this forever but who really knows. I really think a lot of it boils down to MS captured the really hardcore gamers by being a year early. A true hardcore gamer is going to pick up the first next gen system out regardless. So the real hardcore both in media and elsewhere all picked up 360's early and it still resonates to this day imo, theres a lot of media bias toward the 360 and strangely moreseo in the UK than the USA imo. That and the hardcore are more involved with MS because of Halo and Live. I would say Sony hasnt put enough emphasis on FPS but they have brought out two Resistance games, Socom, and now KZ2, but none have really struck jackpot.
Maybe it's the controller? Honestly I'm a longtime Xbox gamer who recently picked up a PS3 and I really struggle on a fundamental level with the DS3 for FPS. Maybe it's as simple as the controller (this could also explain SF4, but OTOH doesn't explain COD4). Or maybe that's the key, COD4. Maybe they need to bring out American, Xbox style games. COD4 is a quintessential Xbox style, community based game to me. And it's done very well on PS3 also. Maybe MAG will tap that, but my early vibe on MAG isnt good personally.
In the end PS3 is selling about as good as 360 worldwide, so doom and gloom is overselling it until/if that changes.
I think Sony also thought that KZ2 would be good enough to ovecome the out of cycle usual blockbuster release time frame.
I think that the casual userbase on the PS3 is far larger than anybody realizes. I suspect cross platforms titles do well on the PS3 because essentially those titles are marketed towards more of the market and PS3 cross platform titles benefit from the hype generated by their 360 bretherens.
KZ2 is probably one of the most marketed (in terms of traditional avenue used to market games) games of this generation. We have seen this title in just about every Sony PS3 presentation and major game conference since before any current gen console was released. Its has seen extensive coverage in the gaming media and has been a hot topic on gaming forums for years.
Yet, it gained little traction with the PS3 userbase. It makes me suspect that a large portion of the PS3 userbase dont really follow E3, GDC or watch and looked videos and pics on the web. They are more affected by more general forms of marketing such advertising on TV and with ads, which in my opinion was sorely lacking with KZ2. While KZ2 had a cool commerical, from a marketing stand point it was rather lacking when compared to the movie trailers, Mountain Dew tie in and other general marketing MS employed for Halo3.
In my opinion if KZ2 would have been a 360 exclusive, even without changing the way the game was marketed, it would have easily rivaled Gears in terms of market penetration. I doubt that the majority of the PS3 userbase rejected KZ2 but rather most don't really know about it due to lack of exposure and lack of long history and loyal following that exist with MGS and GT. I believe that Sony failed to realize that it created a PS3 userbase thats not as game hungry and therefore not as in tune with the traditional forms of marketing usually employed with in the game market. Therefore, if Sony wants to see more success with lesser known titles its going to have to employ heavy use of TV and mag ads to attract its userbase.
KZ2 is probably one of the most marketed (in terms of traditional avenue used to market games) games of this generation. We have seen this title in just about every Sony PS3 presentation and major game conference since before any current gen console was released. Its has seen extensive coverage in the gaming media and has been a hot topic on gaming forums for years.
Yet, it gained little traction with the PS3 userbase. It makes me suspect that a large portion of the PS3 userbase dont really follow E3, GDC or watch and looked videos and pics on the web. They are more affected by more general forms of marketing such advertising on TV and with ads, which in my opinion was sorely lacking with KZ2. While KZ2 had a cool commerical, from a marketing stand point it was rather lacking when compared to the movie trailers, Mountain Dew tie in and other general marketing MS employed for Halo3.
In my opinion if KZ2 would have been a 360 exclusive, even without changing the way the game was marketed, it would have easily rivaled Gears in terms of market penetration. I doubt that the majority of the PS3 userbase rejected KZ2 but rather most don't really know about it due to lack of exposure and lack of long history and loyal following that exist with MGS and GT. I believe that Sony failed to realize that it created a PS3 userbase thats not as game hungry and therefore not as in tune with the traditional forms of marketing usually employed with in the game market. Therefore, if Sony wants to see more success with lesser known titles its going to have to employ heavy use of TV and mag ads to attract its userbase.
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That was definitely a major problem I had with it as well. The game is dark to begin with, and I turned the in-game brightness slider all the way up in the beginning! The darkened corners contribute further, and than all the post processing contributes more to a "difficult to see" situation. Maybe that's it. I can say it did bother me and while acceptable in SP, it did basically turn me off the game's MP.
Absolutely. Case in point, the 'real world' people I know with PS3's certainly didn't know or care about KZ2, and nor did I try to interest them in it, since my own interest was graphics and technology driven; I knew it wasn't their style. Which is why I think that should have been the points SCE tried to bring out to the public (here is a visual achievement!)... but definitely E3, gaming mags - let alone forums - these are the realm of a very small grouping.
I don't think advertising is KZ2's main problem. The product has some limiting issues, and the control is crafted for experienced FPS players. At that h/w price point, I don't think PS3 users are necessarily more casual, but they may be looking for a different kind of games (The PS3 user base may be more mature). I know a few have grown out of FPSes, and some have other real-life issues to worry about in this climate.
Fix the party system and the advanced soldier classes, and I'll hop back in.
360 gamers may sh*t on the current KZ2 problems too.
How many of those shooters sell 5+ million? That's the point here, people saying KZ2 hasn't sold well. But it's sold comparatively well to most shooters, which isn't gangbusters. I'm not the one saying KZ2 is a flop or the market doesn't want it! I'm just giving reasons why KZ2 hasn't sold as well as Gears or Halo or COD, instead selling only as well as Frontlines, Perfect Dark Zero, Far Cry 2, etc.
Why don't they buy other football games?
Why did 9/10 million buy GT or NFS on PS2, but only 2 million bought ATV, Burnout or Crazy Taxi. Why aren't all racing games selling 10 million copies? Why aren't all shooters on PS3 and XB360 selling 5+ million? Halo3 proves the shooter market on XB360 is 9 million gamers, right, and every shooter can be expected to sell to those same 9 million FPs fans?
Because it offers something different, or continues their favourite. Or are you telling me that whoever buys one shooter is likely to buy most of them, and whoever buys FF is likely to buy most JRPGs?
Who says anything about fans of a genre?! Fans of a genre will likely buy it. Shooter fans probably all own Gears, Halo, GRAW, COD, KZ, Resistance etc. And these amount to maybe 2 million console owners. The people who make up the wider market, who push sales of some games to 4 or 5 million and beyond, are people who aren't genre fans but have been convinced to buy a game from that genre anyway. I'm not an FPS fan, so I'm not going to buy lots of them. For KZ2 to sell to me, it has to convince me that it's a better choice than Resistance on the cheap, R2, COD, the upcoming MAG, etc. There's lots of competition. If I had bought R2, my small interest in an FPS would have been satisfied and KZ2 would have missed the sale. If KZ2 only appeals to genre fans, it can't be expected to sell beyond a couple of million.
