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Chris Dring: 'Astro Bot's UK launch is solid. First week sales are 21% higher than the debut of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart'

bundylove

Banned
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FoxMcChief

Gold Member
It's hard to compare, Ratchet was released mid 2021 with millions less PS5 sold.
So wouldn’t that kind of make Astro Bots sales not as good as this sounds?

Damn it UK. Sony finally puts out a great first party game and this is how you do them?!
 

mdkirby

Member
In terms of comparisons to rift apart, it also needs to be put in perspective of team size and years of dev.

The entire studio at insomniac worked on rift apart, they’ve grown a bit in recent years, being at 400 staff in 2021, so let’s chop off another 100 and call it 300, they took 5 years to make it too. VS 60 people and 3 years on Astro, the margins will just be so much higher.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
I’m sure it’ll do really well relative to budget and it also just satisfies a certain niche missing from their catalog. It’s not going to have blockbuster sales though.
 

SkylineRKR

Member
I am sure Astro Bot does fine. The previous retail release was Rescue Mission which was locked to VR. I doubt Sony's expectations were through the roof for this one, we've only had some tech demo ish freebies and a niche VR game from this IP. Yet it does seem to beat Rift Apart which was heavily pushed from PS5 launch onward, and was a more well known IP to begin with. It was one of the big games Sony put out in its first year.

This game will likely have legs as well.
 
Exactly what I was expecting. Similar or even better sales than Ratchet with digital included. 4 years after Ratchet we knew Digital is much higher, it was only logical and Dring was just click baiting.

The fact that Ratchet is a much more known IP and loved since decades is impressive for Team Asobi. Legs are going to be very good.
 

Dafegamer

Member
So wouldn’t that kind of make Astro Bots sales not as good as this sounds?

Damn it UK. Sony finally puts out a great first party game and this is how you do them?!
Ratchet and Clank is an established IP with huge fanfare and Sony's best selling 3D Platforming franchise(I'm not counting LBP as that was 2D and more of a creation tool)so it's impressive if Astro Bot sold more first week
 

FoxMcChief

Gold Member
Ratchet and Clank is an established IP with huge fanfare and Sony's best selling 3D Platforming franchise(I'm not counting LBP as that was 2D and more of a creation tool)so it's impressive if Astro Bot sold more first week
But what did Ratchet sell?
 

Cakeboxer

Gold Member
So wouldn’t that kind of make Astro Bots sales not as good as this sounds?

Damn it UK. Sony finally puts out a great first party game and this is how you do them?!
It will sell well, no question. But i think it's useless to compare it to a game that had a hardware base of ~15 million PS5 while Astro has a hardware base of~60 million Ps5.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
So wouldn’t that kind of make Astro Bots sales not as good as this sounds?

Damn it UK. Sony finally puts out a great first party game and this is how you do them?!
What were you expecting?

It’s not exactly a crazy popular genre outside of basically 1 or 2 Nintendo franchises.
 
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nial

Member
Ratchet and Clank is an established IP with huge fanfare and Sony's best selling 3D Platforming franchise(I'm not counting LBP as that was 2D and more of a creation tool)so it's impressive if Astro Bot sold more first week
LittleBigPlanet never sold better than Ratchet & Clank, anyway. Tools of Destruction outsold LBP1 back in the day.
 

MSduderino

Neo Member
In 2021, there were roughly 20 million PS5s. Now there are 60 million (worldwide). 21% increase (even just in UK) seems paltry considering they should have 2-3 times more PS5s in the UK now.
 
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MSduderino

Neo Member
TOTK uses the same map and some of the same move set/features as BOTW. Astro Bot is pretty different than Rift Apart. I understand the analogy though and it does make the 21% seem more like a success.
 

Dafegamer

Member
LittleBigPlanet never sold better than Ratchet & Clank, anyway. Tools of Destruction outsold LBP1 back in the day.
Do you have a list? I know that the LBP games were quite popular for Sony. I know that R&C PS4 sold 7million+ units
 

GigaBowser

The bear of bad news

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
In 2021, there were roughly 20 million PS5s. Now there are 60 million (worldwide). 21% increase (even just in UK) seems paltry considering they should have 2-3 times more PS5s in the UK now.

Man people just aren't smart these days. Can you read Woopah Woopah post below PLEASE!

To put another way, the Switch userbase when TOTK came out was more than 50x higher than when BOTW came out.

Yet no one should have expected TOTK's week 1 sales to be 50x that of BOTW.
 

Mownoc

Member
That thread about it's physical sales being much worse than Ratchet is looking pretty funny right now.
 

Sooner

Member

And people couldn't understand/believe that it's because digital is a much larger portion of sales now than just a few years ago.
 

Woopah

Member

And people couldn't understand/believe that it's because digital is a much larger portion of sales now than just a few years ago.
It's digital ratio is 10% pts higher, so I wouldn't say it's much larger portion than it was for Ratchett.
 

Varteras

Member

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
For those of you trying to compare Astro sales to R&C vs the install base at the time, I found this article. It excludes 2024 UK PS5 sales, so you can an estimate that to the total.


UK PS5 sales

2020 Not stated (maybe 300k during the Xmas rush?)
2021 1.2M
2022 0.8M
2023 1.2M
2024 Not stated (maybe 500k so far and then Xmas rush?)

So estimated total..... 300k + 1.2M + 0.8M + 1.2M + 500k = 4M? Does that sound reasonable?

So when R&C launched on PS5 in summer 2021, maybe you had 1M UK systems tops??? Take 300k + a portion of 2021.

If Astro sold only 21% more than R&C and PS5 UK install base is 4x what it was when R&C launched in 2021, that's terrible sales.
 
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