Phoenician_Viking
Banned
Why are you so mad?Meijimasha said:
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NPD Sales Results for February 2011 [Update 4: PS3 Hardware, TONS Of Games]
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
Arpharmd B
Banned
BroHuffman said:
Arpharmd B said:
If AAA is not all about the budget and production, then how many sales does it take to be an AAA game? 1 million? 2 million? 10 million? And can you really judge popularity outside of sales?
KZ3 will hit 1 million sales, maybe 2. It probably moved a decent amount of PS3s. Reviews were moderate to good. I'd say it is a AAA game in all ways you can describe it. Is it a great game? Debatable, but I don't think its status as a AAA game is, especially if you go by the definition = big budget commercial game
Arpharmd B
Banned
BroHuffman said:
Doubtful.
Very doubtful.
No.
All my opinion of course.
Arpharmd B said:
Of course. I'm just trying to decipher how to judge a game triple AAA.
I heard/read this once "Has sold, or is predicted/targetted to sell, over one million copies." And that sounds pretty solid, except when you get to smaller budged games that unexpectedly sell really well. Are those games AAA? Like Demon Souls. I wont think so.
KZ3 is/was that definition and I think it fits most reasonable AAA definitions. What I'm not trying to argue is that the game was amazing or the best of the FPS class.
PeakPointMatrix
Member
Are there really no PS3 sales numbers yet? What's going on with this?
Version 3.0
Member
SwiftSketcher said:
No, there was a post about it. 403,000 was the number given, by Pachter if I remember correctly.
PeakPointMatrix
Member
That's not a bad showing, you'd think Sony would do an official press release about it. I thought they sold so little they were staying silent about it. They could use a price drop though..Leondexter said:
Kung Fu Grip said:
xbox 360 didn't exactly set the us on fire in 2005 and 2006. people were perfectly happy buying more ps2s at that point. it wasn't until halo 3 hit that it had its first gigantic month, and it wasn't until late 2008 when sales started to look like they currently do.
BroHuffman said:
AAA denotes both quality and budget as far as I would analyze it. AAA games also need AAA sales in order to justify their existence, unless someone is willing to take a loss.
To compare it with films, it would be the Avatar's, Dark Knight, and even something like Harry Potter. While films like The Kings Speech, True Grit, and Black Swan may have the quality, but they are lower budget and do not depend on huge sales to justify themselves.
But everyone interprets these BS terms differently and some would say Super Meat Boy or Pixel Junk Shooter are AAA titles.
C4Lukins said:
I would argue it denotes expected quality. As AAA games can and have been bad games. And these bad games may or may not sell well.
I would also say an AAA is expected to break even/make a profit. I think this sounds better and is more useful than saying it is expected to hit X amount of sales.
Now to try a one sentence definition. Hmm. "AAA is a game with a nearly extremely large budget that is expected to be a hit and make a profit." Hows that sound?
Edit: I do think this is a lot easier to define than a casual or hardcore gamer, but still equally pointless.
BroHuffman said:
I think it is silly to even try and define it. It is like casuals versus hardcore. Are you hardcore because you play games like COD for thousands of hours? Are you casual because you play farmville for thousands of hours? Or are you hardcore because you play lots of games and casual because you play very few. Nobody agrees on what these terms mean.
Watchtower
Banned
Nesotenso said:
That's what it always meant to me too. A high quality title that most gamers and reviewers agree upon.
High sales just either make it easier for fans to prove that it is such a game(and deserving of those sales) or harder for critics to bash that it isn't, but I always thought sales were irrelevant. Though sometimes initial high sales can make an "ok" game earn AAA status temporarily but with time, those usually turn into "overrated".
Problem is people tend to give AAA statuses to games that haven't been released based simply on the expectations that it will actually turn out to be that way before it earns it(aka hype).
Thunder Monkey
Banned
Very strange generation of consoles this time around.AniHawk said:
Mizzou Gaming
Member
Meijimasha said:
KINECT will actually be huge Holiday 2011 because it will likely be selling at $99. KINECT is an absolute steal at $99, and I can also see them bundling KINECT SPORTS with it to make it an even better deal. Even if they just drop it to $125 or $129 they will see a big boost.
This all just opinion and speculation on my part but with KINECT already making a profit on each unit sold and overhead costs likely to go down it only makes sense. A hot selling product like KINECT gives Microsoft a lot of different options if they want or need to boost sales for the 360 down the line.
Phoenician_Viking
Banned
QFT. Luckily a lot of good games sell well and make profit.Bojanglez said:
AAA, as a video game term, was used in the industry to denote a large budget. Everything else is a result of that. You only need to see how it's used by publishers to talk about games that aren't even half way done to
There was an expected level of quality that would flow out of that, because 95% of business people in the industry (i.e. those who actually used the term) believe that a high budget directly correlates to quality.
It also become synonymous with having a high profile, because a bigger budget means a bigger marketing budget which means more exposure.
Since then it's basically evolved into a term used by people on message boards to describe big budget, high quality (as determined by Metacritic) games that arrived with lots of hype. They'd usually sell well, too.
So using a traditional meaning of the term AAA, Killzone 3 definitely qualifies. They probably spent a ton of money on that game. Using the modern term, it doesn't really qualify. In the era of shooters like Army of Two selling 800k in their launch month, 275k doesn't really cut it.
There was an expected level of quality that would flow out of that, because 95% of business people in the industry (i.e. those who actually used the term) believe that a high budget directly correlates to quality.
It also become synonymous with having a high profile, because a bigger budget means a bigger marketing budget which means more exposure.
Since then it's basically evolved into a term used by people on message boards to describe big budget, high quality (as determined by Metacritic) games that arrived with lots of hype. They'd usually sell well, too.
So using a traditional meaning of the term AAA, Killzone 3 definitely qualifies. They probably spent a ton of money on that game. Using the modern term, it doesn't really qualify. In the era of shooters like Army of Two selling 800k in their launch month, 275k doesn't really cut it.
Phoenician_Viking
Banned
How does that work
?Healthy numbers for the industry.
OldJadedGamer
Banned
legend166 said:
Army of Two part 1 sold 825k if you count both system sales that month... and that was 3 years ago so a lot smaller userbase at the same time.
Phoenician_Viking
Banned
Summer release would work much better than the holidays. The holiday release schedule is overcrowded with big titles, so summer is pretty safe.legend166 said:
I always wondered how come big publishers don´t release games in summer. It is an ideal time. Student/people with work have vacations, so one would have more time to play games.
Watchtower
Banned
Mizzou Gaming said:
The biggest question for me is will Microsoft just go ahead and drop the Kinect/360 bundle to $199 before Christmas or are they going to want that profit margin as high as possible that they are going to be messing around with $50 price cuts. $249 is nice, but that $199 is a magic number for casual gamers.
If they just went ahead and dropped the high-end to $299 and low end to $199 at one time, the impact would be huge. They would own Christmas.
Watchtower
Banned
GavinGT said:
If they want to truly compete for Wii's market share they will. The 360/Kinect bundles will still sell very well at the current price, but there are online retailers selling the Wii brand new right now as cheap as $169.00. Nintendo's going to start the budget wars this fall, of that I am pretty certain. And they will clean up at the sub-$200 levels if they are left uncontested.
Nirolak said:
Well the De Blob guys also worked on Wii's Marvel Super Hero Squad in betweeen De Blobs, but to also remember that they're now a bonafied Xbox 360 and PS3 developer alongside the Wii now. They could do something ENTIRELY different from what they've been doing now. (I've no idea)
BroHuffman said:
Because GG failed to deliver 90+ metacritic score again, people call Killzone series a second-tier of high budget project now(lol).
Seeing so much divergenced opinion on what Killzone production will be, the last one setence we would agree is the hype level of Killzone PS3 is always S grade.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
Disappointing numbers. Hopefully they'll have some legs!
REMEMBER CITADEL
Banned
Watchtower said:
A $100 drop? No, that's way too much.
One of the great things about Kinect is the fact that now they can price adjust on two fronts: they can drop the price on Kinect and they can drop it on the base hardware. Considering how well the Kinect bundles sell, either of those should give them a big push. Doing both at the same time would be an overkill (depending on the amount). They would probably see diminishing returns and it would effectively shorten the lifespan of both platforms.
No, with a decent line-up, some marketing and a small price adjustment (maybe even that won't be needed), they should be able to own this holiday season anyway.
Psychotext
Member
Holy crap at the CoD numbers... that's insane after 4 months on sale.
Wolves Evolve
Member
Would like to know more detail on De Blob 2 sales.
Hero of Legend
Member
Hope Epic Mickey is one of those 22 games that did over 100,000 this month.