I see NPD Numbers
Well, I see NPD numbers that Gamasutra saw. Here’s the interesting parts:
To be exact, numbers cross-platform are: Madden NFL 09 sold 3.9 million, Burnout Paradise sold 592,000, Dead Space sold 421,000, and Mirror’s Edge sold 145,000.
Wow. I knew that Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge weren’t successes for EA, but I didn’t realize that the latter was so poorly sold.
Ok, so those are sales numbers for EA. Big whoop. Here’s where I get a little less happy…when people start to think like this:
How sad. These games definitely deserved to sell more.
And I sure hope this won’t result in cancellation of these series or that innovative games are a thing of past.
That’s the first comment on the Gamasutra article. I’m not singling out that guy, but the sentiment. I’ve seen it all over in the debate on Mirror’s Edge and how good it was and how it should be rated and so on. As a matter of fact, some big name journalists recently said the same thing.
That’s just crap. If the games had been better, they might have sold better. I can’t tell you one thing about Dead Space other than it’s apparently very messy and is a horror game. Not really my bag and no one I talked that played it said it was a must play. But Mirror’s Edge… Yeah, they tried, but it was broken. It didn’t flow right, it didn’t feel right and even though some of the stuff was cool, for most people it was just an effort in futility. Plus, it’s a new game in a recession without anything to bring in the Big Guns Big Breasts™ guys.
Whatever the reasons it didn’t sell to well, it doesn’t matter… Because EA has already said they are going to back their old ways. Except well, they never really left them. Spinning your story for less than a year doesn’t count for leaving your old ways behind. Especially when at the first sign of not huge success, you turn around and run the other way.
All of that aside… The next person that says this game or that game deserved better reviews or sales gets a fucking smack. Games don’t deserve shit. They either sell well or they don’t. They earn their way by good design, good marketing and good execution. Usually.
These are my rules for purchasing games:
1) We don’t give charity lays. Really. We don’t buy games because they should have been good or we really like the developer. The game is either worth buying or not.
2) We don’t, at any point, believe anything EA says until they start telling us the truth at least part of the time. Look at John R, the CEO. He says he hates DRM…this from the company that released the most pirated game ever (since people started paying attention), due in at least some part to the draconian DRM measure on it (it being Spore). So when buying an EA game, we need to be doubly sure it isn’t poop.
3) We don’t buy Epic Games. Much like we don’t support Nike because they employ children to work for them (is that still true?), we don’t buy from people who complain about not making enough money off the secondary market on one hand while raking in TENS of MILLIONS with the other. From one game.
Maybe I’m being a jackass here, but I couldn’t give a shit of EA succeeds or fails. They don’t watch out for me, I don’t watch out for them. I hope every single employee at EA is happy or finds another job if they are let go, but EA as a company is waring with me, the customer. How much care should I put into their financial difficulties? Zero.
What Would Matt Do: I’ll buy the games that are good and I won’t buy the ones that suck. Plain and simple. And I won’t buy from Epic. Seems like simple enough rules. For a company that we can have sympathy for, we turn to Troy Goodfellow and his piece on Ensemble. Good read so far.