Gaming Sales

GTA IV Midnight Launch

The ultimate next-gen game is finally in the hands of the masses as GameStops and Best Buys across the country doled out copies at midnight tonight. I counted around seventy people at my local GameStop. As I approached the line to take a picture, an employee ushered me in to the store to pay in advance so they could hand out the copies quickly at the strike of the witching hour.

The dude at the front of the line said he’d been waiting there for only a few hours. I guess there was never any doubt there’d be plenty of copies to go around. There was no sign of any hookers, crooked cops, or Russian crime lords.

The only safety concern I had was from a guy standing a couple of spots ahead of me in line. All the poor guy’s credit cards were rejected, and for a moment I thought he might go GTA on the employee who was telling him he couldn’t have the game. Fortunately, he just walked out of the store with his head down all embarrassed.

Now, like millions of other gamers across the country, I face a dilemma. I have to be at my job tomorrow by around eight or nine in the morning. It’s well past midnight, but I have a copy of GTAIV in my hands. GTAIV! Should I be responsible and get some sleep, or fire up the 360? Ah, who am I kidding? There’s no dilemma. Fire it up!!!

Prey An Impulse Buy This Weekend

I’ll make this quick because if I spend too much time saying it you might miss it. This weekend only you can buy Prey via Steam for just four dollars and ninety five cents. That’s $4.95 via Steam. No gas spent going to the store, no paper box to feel guilty about, no copy protection requiring you to keep the disc in the CD-ROM drive of your Windows PC, just a sci-fi shooter that Metacritic has rated at 83%. Not bad. I liked the demo, but not enough to buy it. At this price, I’ve already bought it.

Source: VoodooExtreme

Stardock Developer Shares Secret of Success: Ignore Piracy

So way back in 2006, I wrote about how developers of low quality games are usually the loudest decriers of game piracy.

With the rightly deserved success of Sins of a Solar Empire, “Draginol”, a Stardock developer recently posted the secrets to PC game success. It’s amazingly simple:

Our games sell well for three reasons. First, they’re good games which is a pre-requisite. But there’s lots of great games that don’t sell well.

Our games work on a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
Our games target genres with the largest customer bases per cost to produce for.

Oddly, draconian copy protection doesn’t really fit in anywhere. Since pirates aren’t part of the consumer base they care to develop games for, they pay attention to who DOES pay for a certain type of game.

This is something that I’ve been saying for years. Piracy doesn’t determine the success or failure of video games. So can we please stop packaging games with badly-implemented copy protection schemes?

EA Says “Maximum Platinum” for Crysis

When the NPD numbers came in last month for the PC, the numbers showed a decent showing for Crysis, but far less than what most people seemed to think in regards of sales for the highly touted PC exclusive shooter. Immediately people sprung to life proclaiming PC gaming dead and that Crysis was soon to be headed to the PS3.

Well, today, EA sang a different tune at their year end fianacial meeting for shareholders. At that meeting, it was announced that Crysis recently went platinum, meaning that one million units of the game have been sold at either retail or via digital download channels. This is a marked improvement from the 88,000 that were sold in the first week, when failure was all but annoucned for the game. The strong showing for the game most likely comes from the European market where PC gaming is still the strongest platform for game sales.

via Joystiq

See Also:

Unreal Tournament III for the PC Sinks, While Crysis Aims High

Let’s Extinguish the Never-ending Funeral Pyre for PC Gaming

Fry’s Is Making Deals

So today I was over at my in-laws doing some laundry when I performed my weekly task at their house, which is digging out the Friday ad for Fry’s Electronics. Anyone that has gone to a Fry’s knows two things. They offer excellent deals, and they have the most inept and idiotic customer service imaginable. You would think that bad customer service would leave me hating Fry’s but when you see some of the deals they offer, you can understand why I would overlook this issue. Seeing this week’s ad, I saw some items that really caught my eye that I thought I would pass on to the readers.

Read the rest of this entry »

What a sequel could mean for commercial failure Zack & Wiki.

The almost unanimous praise from gamers and critics alike for Capcom’s recent Zack & Wiki: The Quest for Barabaros’ Treasure stands in stark contrast to its pathetic sales. One of the last things one would expect from a game that sold that poorly would be a sequel, but perhaps that’s not the way things are destined to be.

One of the earliest noticeable pushes for the game came from the staff at IGN Wii, specifically from Matt Casamassina and Matt Bozon. They started a well-publicized “Buy Zack & Wiki” campaign before the game was even launched based on their preview impressions, and have spent a lot of time in their Wii-k in Review podcast recommending the game, and with good reason. It’s a gem.

More than once, Matt has mentioned a possible sequel to the game in their podcast, which is not something Capcom has publicly discussed. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to think that a sequel is something Capcom would discuss with IGN Wii, considering the fact that they acknowledged the campaign and clearly have recognized the importance of such attention to sales.

Further, thinking back to another key Capcom franchise, a sequel’s ability to raise a franchise from the depths is not unprecedented. The original Mega Man was a commercial failure. It wasn’t until sleeper hit Mega Man 2 rocked gaming that the franchise gave the first glimmer that it could be a major cash cow for Capcom.

Just saying.

See also:
Zack & Wiki a brilliant game, and one of a few compelling reasons to own a Wii.
Hate Zack & Wiki? Want a free copy? Hey, wait…
Zack & Wiki hits Tuesday, will it be as good as it looks?

SCI Entering a Financial Whirlpool

With the redesigned Tomb Raider: Legend and Anniversary games getting rave reviews from the gaming press and gamers alike, it is strange to see parent company SCi taking a hit financially. All does not seem to be going well several years after the buyout and takeover of Eidos Interactive. Eidos has had some serious flops in the last few years and the whole Kane and Lynch fiasco with gamers and Gamespot did not help matters any (although that game did sell over a million copies).

Bloomberg UK let readers know that the stock for SCi was down to a paltry 83 pence ( about a $1.68USD) and that it was going to have some serious issues with cash to meet its upcoming 2008 lineup and pay obligations. Four games, including the newly announced Tomb Raider: Underworld have been pushed out to 2009 and there is no guarantee at this point that they will have the money to actually get those games released. Looking more and more like Atari at this point, SCi made investors aware after trading hours that it will not be able to get full value out of the gaming unit if it is sold to another company.

Funny thing is that everyone had doubts about this merger when it happened and now it all seems to be coming to fruition now. The only thing that would put a fitting end to this story is if EA swooped in and decided that it needed another company under its belt to catch up to Activision Blizzard.

With help from Bloomberg UK

Retail Roundup: Mixed Feelings.

CheapAssGamer is very popular. While that’s great for when they, say, give Aeropause a shout-out like they did on CagCast #100, it’s not so great when the clearance sales are posted. Invariably, by the time I reach a store mid-day to late in the day they’ve been picked clean if they stocked the items at all.

That’s why it’s with mixed feelings that I bring the latest Circuit City video game clearance to your attention. What titles do I like? Let’s see.

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Get Your Wii Weapons Here.

I’ve been reading Dealnews for years and every so often I see something really odd on sale. Today’s nutty item is a set of Wii Weapons. For just 25 bucks you can pick up the Wii Remote Weapon Kit with two swords, an axe, a shield, a pistol, and two daggers. Perfect for taking your sibling rivalry or fights for who gets next turn on the console to the next level.

The bullet points at Shop4Tech are quite numerous, if a bit repetitive:
* Nintendo Wii Weapon Kit 8in1 Bundle Set
* Ease set-up and use
* Childish soft materials manufacture ,no hazaro
* Amazing,exciting,fantastic and training body reaction
* Special design for Wii action,fighting or shooting light gun games
* Physical exercise ideal Wii accessories product and good for health
* What’s inside the box of Nintendo Wii Weapon Kit 8in1 Bundle Set
* Weapon Kit 8in1 Bundle Set(x1)

Source: Dealnews

UT3 PS3 Sales Better Than PC But Still No Killing Spree

While I can’t consider 110,000 copies of UT3 being sold for the PS3 in it’s first two weeks (70,000 Week 1, 40,000 Week 2) fantastic, I will say that it’s leaps and bounds better than the reported 39,000 or so sales of the PC version. Tack on the fact that the game sold for an additional $10 on the PS3 and we can assume that to be even a little more gravy for Epic’s pork chop.

I definitely notice the online community for the PS3 version growing by the day. The official UT3 forums are buzzing with PC owners who are begging for PS3/PC shared servers, miffed by supposed empty PC servers. The possiblity of such a move is remote, considering the extended waiting time for patches to be released on the console. I’m still waiting for the first PS3 patch to improve the layout of the in-game and online server menus, along with the whole “Mod Cooking” thing you might have heard about. According to Mark Rein the Sony certification process has slowed things down signifcantly.

So not a fantastic start, but definitely a good one. Even if it was only a lowly 25th on the weekly sales list in it’s first week.

Via VGChartz.com