Dreams-Visions said:
stop speaking of GT5 in a vacuum, as if it were a new IP or something.
it's THE biggest IP Sony owns, and every release has approached or eclipsed 10 million units sold. That's the rarest of rare air. Forza was never expected to come close in overall sales; it doesn't have the heritage, fanbase or mindshare that GT does. hell, the entire franchise is only 5 years old or so. Gran Turismo goes back 3 fucking generations.
No, GT5 isn't just any old racing game with any old sales expectations. At least offer such thoughts through the lens of that reality.
I agree. If you take that the rhetoric that "GT is Sony's biggest franchise" that's been thrown around here for years at face value, 400k in a few days is poor. As posted above, Fable 3 did noticeably better in October, and it's MS' 3rd biggest exclusive (5th if you count Mass Effect and Left 4 Dead) in the US at best. Donkey Kong, a mid-tier Nintendo franchise, is slightly ahead, and will likely leapfrog it further in December.
But taken in the reality of this generation (where racing games not named Mario Kart barely sniff 500k on one platform in one territory, Forza 2 and 3 sold roughly 1/2 as much in similar timeframes, and quality games like Split/Second and Blur fucking bombed), 400k is pretty good.
So I think it's more of a case of gamers having unrealistic expectations for the market, rather than the game being a massive flop. I wonder what Sony's internal projections were. MS has to be smiling about this. They didn't invest tens of millions of dollars into the Forza franchise and give away literally millions of copies of F2/F3 as stocking stuffers just to watch GT5 walk in and be a system seller again. I'd say the Forza franchise served its purpose - it sated a large enough chunk of the sim racer fanbase to dull GT5's system seller appeal. Prologue probably didn't help, especially at $40. And the launch fiasco was an embarrassment for everyone involved.
Going forward in the US, Sony is really going to have to hang its hat on Killzone 3 and Uncharted 3 being big hits in 2011 to sustain US sales in the absence of a price drop. SOCOM might be their big surprise of the year, as most tactical shooter devs have completely dropped the ball as of late and there is a gaping hole that hasn't been filled since Vegas 2 came out. I expect LBP2 and Infamous 2 will be good/great games, but will sell in the 500k-750k range in the states and be relative non-factors.
now
