Dark Souls and Dark Sales

Necuno

Necuno

The Piper
Dark Souls and Dark Sales

Dark Souls sold over two million copies and is a bonafide success. Tomb Raider sold over three million copies and is a disappointing failure. Wut?

Different projects obviously have different standards for success, but the divide between Dark Souls and recent releases by Capcom and Square Enix is staggering. What's gone wrong, that selling over three million copies of a game can be deemed a letdown? And what has Dark Souls done right?

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Read more at http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vid...Dark-Souls-and-Dark-Sales#4WgsYL0oS09Vv0vz.99
 
The majority of AAA games have way inflated production costs. I mean, Bioshock Infinite allegedly cost $200 million to develop. It's farking ridiculous.

And then to think small indie games developed on shoestring budgets are often much better than what AAA publishers push out.
 
Graal said:
The majority of AAA games have way inflated production costs. I mean, Bioshock Infinite allegedly cost $200 million to develop. It's farking ridiculous.

And then to think small indie games developed on shoestring budgets are often much better than what AAA publishers push out.
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The publishers screw up the games many times. They think they know what the gaming crowd wants , and end up giving us the same boring shit every year.

That's why games that are developed and published by the same company usually turn out to be much better.
 
Graal said:
The majority of AAA games have way inflated production costs. I mean, Bioshock Infinite allegedly cost $200 million to develop. It's farking ridiculous.
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Why do you think its inflated? e.g. GTA V
137.5 million cost
500 million revenue in the first week.

Yes the numbers look big, with those kind of numbers a couple hundred dev costs are a bargain. Sure I picked a successful game, but the point is the numbers aren't all that unrealistic. I'd imagine games like WoW are much more profitable than that even.
 
Forgive me if I am wrong but wasn't the developer of Dark Souls reluctant about doing a pc version due to the piracy rate and thus 2 million sales exceeding sales expectancy while Tomb Raider was always a big thing on pc especially after its reboot and re reboot?
 
HavocXphere said:
Why do you think its inflated? e.g. GTA V
137.5 million cost
500 million revenue in the first week.

Yes the numbers look big, with those kind of numbers a couple hundred dev costs are a bargain. Sure I picked a successful game, but the point is the numbers aren't all that unrealistic. I'd imagine games like WoW are much more profitable than that even.
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And for every success story there's two or three more that aren't. DmC didn't hit the sales it expected, neither did Tomb Raider and neither did Dead Space 3. 4 months into 2013.

Have you seen EA's marketing budget from last year? It was way excessive. Don't let them fool you, all these big publishers waste money like nobody's business. They can develop games for a lot cheaper and still maintain the same level of quality if they started learning to manage their money properly.
 
simon said:
Forgive me if I am wrong but wasn't the developer of Dark Souls reluctant about doing a pc version due to the piracy rate and thus 2 million sales exceeding sales expectancy while Tomb Raider was always a big thing on pc especially after its reboot and re reboot?
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I think they were reluctant because they've never developed for PC before.
 
Two very different games. As mentioned before production costs. For example I don't remember there being much voice acting in Dark souls.

Also the fact that Tomb Raider is a huge franchise, movies so on. Its expected to do well because of its history, you would expect a half decent game with a long history to do well. Where as Darks souls was the spiritual successor of some other game I cant even remember at the moment. On top of that its dark Souls 1, so in some peoples minds a new game.

Darks would most likely have had a very small budget, relatively, and was more a "lets test the concept and see if anyone is interested", in the hope of creating a new franchise (seems to have worked out). Tomb Raider is a big franchise in need of a reboot of some sorts, their expectations would have been much higher than darks souls.

Im rambling but one last thing, consider how hard dark souls is, I think it would have been incredibly difficult to get someone to put the money up for a game were most people wont be able to finish it. I think it looks like it was a pretty risky move that hopefully will pay off for them. I new genre of sadistic gaming.
 
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