Clay Davis
Member
the omission of online coop was the deal breaker for me. i was all geared up to pay $60 but then i found out it was only local coop. no thanks.
ignore the obvious bait post.
NPD November 2011 Sales Results [Update 7: Skyrim, CoD Wii, PC Retail Sales Up 57%]
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the omission of online coop was the deal breaker for me. i was all geared up to pay $60 but then i found out it was only local coop. no thanks.
ignore the obvious bait post.
CitizenCope
Member
Sold a thousand on average per state. =D
It's not even the fact that I think it isn't worth more than "15$" , it's just that nobody tries different pricing strategies anymore.
Steam sales (Gaben intervies, indie devs interviews) have proven that low pricepoints can make a lot of money.
Rayman at 25$ could have sold a lot more in my opinion. I for one, would have bought it (preferebly on Steam). But Ubisoft is dense. They don't PC gaming, and it seems they have miscalculated the market for Rayman tremendously.
And thus you have the entire problem in a nut shell. I think almost everyone skipped it. For 60 bucks why would you buy a 2D platformer when you could buy skyrim or uncharted 3 or zelda , call of duty, batman, etc etc.
This has been a very big year for big releases, and most of them have come out in the last 60 days. To use a famous Luke Smith -ism , Rayman got sent to die by simply NOT being one of those big AAA releases.
Sure the game is good but these days even 10 year olds want to play call of duty instead of mario.
It likely would have been beneficial to keep the original plan with Rayman and do a digital only release , even an episodic one for a total of 30$ (or 10$ each for 3 episodes). They could have had one ready in september , done another one in january and maybe had a 3rd one in the summer. At the very least they might have sold the same, without having any retail stock to worry about.
Now they've shipped however many copies and come january Rayman will be in the bargain bin for 20 bucks. This was the second reason why I passed, because given the market I KNEW it wasn't going to sell amazingly which meant, why would pay 60 bucks for a game I had no time to play when it's going to be much cheaper a month or 2 later after some poor sales ?
opticalmace
Member
Nooo Rayman! Wrong time to release a great game.
Clay Davis
Member
if the talk of them greenlighting BG&E2 if it sold well is true, its probably sabotage by ubisoft rather than miscalculation.
they probably dont see the value in BG&2 now that their other cash cow - assassins creed - is going well.
mysticwhip
Banned
Damn @ Rayman it was expected but damn. Should have been xbla/psn at no more than 15$ and not released in November.
Well they originally did crow about how small the team was and how quickly they were able to produce content despite it. Back when it was DD only and included PC. So, yeah, I don't have any sympathy for them. It was going to bomb when they ditched DD only and went retail. Guess they felt 50,000 * retail was a better profit margin. *shrugs* I'll pick it up in a month when somebody has it for 9.99. I'm not subsidizing UBI.
crazy monkey
Banned
come on man. It is amazing game. It is like people think if it is 2D game it has to be just 15$ xbla version. Where as most of the 60$ games now a days are 5 hour games. It is one of the beautiful and good game to come out this year. It is sad that modern gaming teenagers are accepting fps more than other type of games. DKCR ,kirby ,mario are doing fine. Also rabbit are good as mascot. They should have some how connected that to this game just for promotion purposes. They are bigger than raymen now. Look at there sell on wii. I am sure they did fine from what I can remember.
The market has been conditioned to expect relatively cheap prices for any new 2D platformers, and this expectation was built over the course of several years by exploiting DD platforms to be able to sell at those prices. You reap what you sow.
Nintendo ends up being the exception here due to a combination of pure brand power and the fact that they DIDN'T do any of the above.
hey_it's_that_dog
benevolent sexism
You can argue that a 2D game is worth just as much as a 3D game, but what matters is public perception.
What was the last 2D platformer that ended up on retail shelves for $60? (Not a rhetorical question, I really don't know.)
I also want to argue that the budget for Rayman had to be orders of magnitude smaller than Skyrim or Batman or Uncharted 3 and all the other $60 games that came out this Fall. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, it would have been wise to price it lower, not as an admission of low quality, but as an admission of less than AAA budget.
Do you consider LittleBigPlanet to be 2D?
LordPhoque
Banned
50k, holy shit... hope it did better in Europe (pretty sure it did well in France)
It was launched at the worst time ever. Game's worth the price though.
Is the "50k is not so bad" crowd for real ?
It was launched at the worst time ever. Game's worth the price though.
Is the "50k is not so bad" crowd for real ?
paparazzo
Member
Sorry if it's been covered, but is there any particular reason the 360 is doing so well? I doubt it's just kinect as there's no kinect games in the top 10. It's strange that sales are better than ever for them and they're hardly releasing any big exclusives. I'm sure a large chunk are wii/ps2 owners looking to "upgrade" but it makes little sense when they biggest games are multiplatform.
You should!.
I would say the PS3.
Four_Chamber
Member
1.7 million in year 7 of a console. Nearly doubling the nearest competitor and taking nearly 50% of the console market. This is crazy stuff at this point in a consoles lifetime.
twdnewh_k
Member
Same exact situation.
What micro has done with the reinventing of the xbox brand with multiple UI changes and now Kinect is what helps keep the system fresh. Also awesome games. Also xbox live.
It had some pretty great Black Friday sales. The Core unit was as low as $140 ($60 off), and the 250GB unit went as low as $200 ($100 off).
By comparison the other two systems had pretty crappy deals. Wal-Mart's Wii sale was for a gimped version of the system in a horrifyingly ugly baby blue color. Most PS3 sales only represented a $50 discount.
walking fiend
Member
1. There's a kinect game in the top 10, Just Dance 3. I believe in October Just Dance 3 + Dance Central 2 combined (both almost 75k) sold almost 1/3 of Just Dance 3 on Wii (450K). Put into consideration that installed based is pretty small now. Kinect sold almost as much as 360 itself from Black Friday data
2. It has the better versions of the games, Skyrim being an obvious example
3. Which is probably the more important reason, community effect that online gaming has. CoD is the single biggest game on HD consoles by far (and BF has been the next during past months).
4. Slim model is pretty cheap and functional, unlike arade models which were cheap both in terms of price and build
5. Bundles were insane this month for 360. Kinect at 99%, 4GB at 140$, etc.
The reason for the insanely high CoD sales is because there is a huge group of people that only buy Call of Duty games right? I recall reading about that sometime ago or I'm just imagining it but I don't think I am. You have people that buy games year round that buy it but those are people that also buy Mario, Zelda, Uncharted, Gears, Halo, Resident Evil, etc. Then there is I believe a separate group that just buy Call of Duty and play that and nothing else (maybe Madden) and then jump on the next one that comes out. Is that what we're looking at here and perhaps why no FPS can dethrone it and why it's foolish to try? Since it simply isn't normal game buyers playing the game but Call of Duty only players and you can't convert those or get them to try other games because they have no desire to play anything else. Didn't this used to be the case with Madden in the past or maybe still is?
Is this the wrong way to look at the CoD sales?
Is this the wrong way to look at the CoD sales?
outunderthestars
Banned
I'm spending $60 on Rayman. It simply is not worth that kind of money. Should have launched at $39.99
I think COD sells well because the fanbase wants to play multiplayer with people on their friends list. It has developed its own community, like WoW did.
I think COD sells well because the fanbase wants to play multiplayer with people on their friends list. It has developed its own community, like WoW did.
TheFightingFish
Member
I have no clue where all the "$15 on XBLA / PSN" ideas are coming from for Rayman Origins. The issues is the type of game and the month they released it it, as I see it. Do folks really know how much even the bigger titles on XBLA sell? I know the revenue splits are better for DD, but losing the Wii as a platform and selling 2x to 3x more to make up the cost difference? I just don't see it, folks would have said "Hey 4 player Rayman for $15! That looks great! I'll just pick it up after I'm done with Skyrim and Uncharted 2" and then forgotten about it.
I don't see any pricing or platform changes that would have saved it from floppage. Now releasing in say summer? On either DD or media, that might have helped a bit from what I think.
I don't see any pricing or platform changes that would have saved it from floppage. Now releasing in say summer? On either DD or media, that might have helped a bit from what I think.
walking fiend
Member
I don't know about CoD. But one of the reasons I quit playing DotA was because it became the only game that I had been playing for almost 5 years. I believe since last year I have finished as much games as I did during that whole 5 years. Heck, DotA was my only entertainment.
Well, it's seen as the system for Call of Duty. So if all someones friends are playing MW3 on 360 someone is more likely to buy one to play with them.
Just Dance is also very popular, and for Kinect I think.
Plus the console itself is cheaper than a PS3.
Alx
Member
But why would you not consider it worth it ? Is it too ugly ? Too short ? Too easy ? Too common ?
As far as I know, that game is good looking, quite long, challenging, and has a unique visual style. Plus multiplayer.
Christ, I hope not. Give me 1:1 swordplay over dildos any day.
GitarooMan
Member
I hope not, it's really bad for this game. I'm a huge Rayman fan, so it's very disappointing. Hopefully Euro sales will make it respectable. It's too bad because this game is so much better than the avalanche of Rabbids trash we've been getting for five years.
You must have expected pretty epicly bad numbers then.
They all did well too.
There were plenty of commercials on Cartoon Network all through the day.entrement said:
Hot Coldman
Banned
Rayman 
They should get it up on Steam.
They should get it up on Steam.
I was delivering a pizza the other day, and when the door opened it was a pair of jocky college students playing Call of Duty. One of them just kept playing, while the other searched around their mess of an apartment looking for his wallet. I notice their game collection displayed prominently on a shelf - probably the only thing that was organized in the entire place. It was every Call of Duty from 2 to MW3, in order, with no other games whatsoever.
The_Darkest_Red
Member
Man, those Rayman numbers are super depressing. I picked it up day one but I didn't expect it to do well. What a shame.
ThisWreckage
Banned
I'd say Sony did pretty damn good, but not great. I was expecting a disaster.
Rayman
They should get it up on Steam.
If you're making a platformer not called Mario, excluding Steam is setting yourself up for failure.
AbsoluteZero
Banned
I'm hoping Nintendo can resist being seduced by this, it's why the Wii was my favorite console this generation.
Rayman
They should get it up on Steam.
Totally..
Anyways they released it at an awful time. To many big games out and hell even Sonic released just over a week earlier. More kids/parents know who Sonic is... over Rayman.
TheLastCandle
Member
That's such a shame about Rayman, but it was easy to see it coming. A lot of games are going to get lost in the shuffle this season (like every holiday season) but a game like that awash in a sea of testosterone and dance games had no chance.