SCEA acquires Zipper Interactive (Socom team)

[mckmas8808]

*nods*

Pejorative being the key word of my post, mckmass. I dont think the content of your thread applies there.

Im not trying to stir things up with anyone in particular, but sometimes you just shake your head. Its practically rhythmic at this point.

My fault liverkick. I deeply aplogize. Some people here have been directly attacking me the last few weeks and it sometimes makes me ready to jump on the first person that types my name into their post. :smile:

 

[drpepper]

Nothing Bungie had done before could have predicted the hit that Halo became so you can have developers work on what were niche titles and then eventually produce a blockbuster. So it's a good idea to cultivate as much talent as possible, as long as Sony can fund titles like the Medicis funded stuff which is of interest to some people.

Excuse me? Marathon 1, 2 and Infinity were huge hits on the Macintosh market. And you can tell the spirit of Marathon lives on today in Halo. Myth 1 and 2 were awesome as well. their original game, pathways into darkness was what got them on the map.

Mac users were enjoying multiplayer Marathon lan parties well before Live was ever born.

The Marathon engine to this day is now open source and has internet online play.

Bungie demonstrated, real-time (tm), the Halo engine at the San Francisco Macworld conference for everyone to see. Microsoft knew what it was doing in acquiring Bungie, they knew it would have a hit on its hand due to past success in the small but rabid Mac gaming market.

 

[wco81]

I would guess the Mac sales of Marathon were in the thousands. At most tens of thousands. Likewise for Oni.

Not millions or maybe over ten million as is the case for Halo2. Definitely both Halo games are well over ten million.

 

[drpepper]

Oni probably sold more in numbers than Marathon Inf. mainly due to the fact that it was also a PS2 title as well. But it didn't do as well but did incorporate a sweet close combat system.

i can assure you Marathon sold well into the millions.

 

[Inane_Dork]

I would guess the Mac sales of Marathon were in the thousands. At most tens of thousands. Likewise for Oni.

Not millions or maybe over ten million as is the case for Halo2. Definitely both Halo games are well over ten million.

If you were looking solely at sales, then you were looking in the wrong place.

For one, there's quality. Bungie's games were good before Halo, so there was indeed an implication from that that Halo would be good.

Two, Halo had a large amount of hype. That, too, helped it.

 

[wco81]

Right but quality doesn't always guarantee success.

All I know is when games were ported to the Mac, they were doing well if they sold in the 5-digits.

Millions would be unprecedented for the Mac. It's fairly rare for PCs.

Console games usually sell an order of magnitude over PCs and PCs in turn, an order of magnitude over Macs.

 

[Inane_Dork]

<snip>

I just realized I'm dreadfully off topic. Sorry.

 

[The_Standard]

I would guess the Mac sales of Marathon were in the thousands. At most tens of thousands. Likewise for Oni.

Not millions or maybe over ten million as is the case for Halo2. Definitely both Halo games are well over ten million.

This line of thinking doesn't apply to Marathon on the Mac at all. Pretty much everyone I knew who had a Mac in those days owned a copy of Marathon. Even people who didn't have a single other Mac game title. It was all over the place. It was the game to have.

The original Marathon on the Mac sold over 50,000 copies...a remarkable number for any Mac-only game software, and easily equiv. to a million-seller in the PC market. I'm not certain how many copies of Marathon 2 they moved on the Mac, but it wouldn't surprise me if they sold the same or more.

Everyone knew Halo would be a success and that Bungie was a great house long before MS got them. The hype for that game at Macworld was huge.

 

[one]

I wonder what motivated SCE Worldwide studios to snap up Guerilla and Zipper Interactive.

Maybe the owners of those studios wanted to buy a new Ferrari so they went to SCE to say "hello I got a buyout offer from Microsoft yesterday what can I do for you?"

 

[Serenity Painted Death]

Well, I think the point of these acquisitions is obvious:

Zipper makes the top online game for PS2 (by a huge margin).

I suppose they are hoping for a miracle with GG... that they'll produce something to get console FPS gamers interested in aside from Halo. I don't think this is going to happen, nor does it really need to, anyway, people don't buy Playstation for FPS (of course, this is what they're trying to change, but whatever). Zipper also factors into this.

The FPS genre is pretty much dominated solely by MS in the console world... and also consequently the only area Sony pretty much doesn't dominate... they've recently bought two primarily FPS companies, and have other close business ties (Insomniac) also making a FPS. Without a stranglehold on the FPS genre, MS's already slim chance of unseating Sony in the States is reduced to virtually nothing. I don't blame them for trying, but I remain unconvinced this will do much of anything.

 

[liverkick]

The FPS genre is pretty much dominated solely by MS in the console world... and also consequently the only area Sony pretty much doesn't dominate... they've recently bought two primarily FPS companies, and have other close business ties (Insomniac) also making a FPS. Without a stranglehold on the FPS genre, MS's already slim chance of unseating Sony in the States is reduced to virtually nothing. I don't blame them for trying, but I remain unconvinced this will do much of anything.

1st party contributions to the genre remain to be seen from Sony, but a good portion of the Western PC base of developers that were pretty much exclusive to MS last gen are supporting both platforms equally this time around. That should help shore up Playstation's relative deficiency in the genre a great deal. The Nvidia partnership no doubt paying some dividends in this regard.

edit- And technically, SOCOM is a third-person shooter.