Square Enix reports disappointing record breaking sales.

[Dark Jaguar]

...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/artic...-tomb-raid

This confuses me.



How are those "low" sales? What were their projections exactly? A skajillion sales?

Million seller means you win at game business. Full stop. Stick a gold star on that sucker and sell it as a "player's choice", pat yourself on the back and get the deluxe car wash, you earned it, earner.

If that is considered "poor sales", sorry Squeenix, we can't help you. Your games are selling as well as you can reasonably expect, so clearly if you are losing money, you're handling project funding poorly. I dunno, maybe your vendors are ripping you off, but you have to get your house in order so that 3 million games sold means you actually profited.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, it's because of things like this that some people are saying that the industry is in trouble. If over 3 and a half million sales in your first month aren't enough, seriously, that's just completely absurd...

[Dark Jaguar]

When that's considered a failure, I mean, what do they want we should do about it? Clearly everyone that was interested bought it. What, do they want 100% completion on sales? Maybe 101* super secret completion where they sell the game to the mole people too.

[A Black Falcon]

If games don't sell CoD numbers, they have failed!

[Dark Jaguar]

Maybe Square Enix is trying to catch lightning in a bottle again and get those old Final Fantasy VII sales. Well, that ship has sailed. Maybe one day you'll get that wunderkind again, but not so long as you keep dumbing down the franchise.

Call of Duty sales... Yeah that's a huge game, but one set of series still outsells it. EA's big sports rehashes still outdo pretty much everything in the console market. That's why Madden 2013 for Playstation 2 (two) exists.

[Great Rumbler]

The AAA big-budget game market is just so saturated at this point that there's no way every game can sell that many copies. Games that big used to be, say, once every few months. Now? Sometimes we'll get more than one EVERY month! That's just not sustainable, not when most gamers probably aren't buying more than 2-3 games per year [with at least one of those being a CoD game].

[Dark Jaguar]

I thought AAA meant "good game". What does it mean now, just shorthand for "big budget"?

[Great Rumbler]

Yeah, that's what it's used for. Games with huge budgets and tons of press/hype.

[Dark Jaguar]

Sad. I remember when "AAA" meant "killer game", or "must have". You'd call Ocarina of Time a AAA game, or Perfect Dark, or heck, Tetris for Gameboy.

You know what I call AAA? Super Hexagon. That game is just plain addictive. Incredibly hard, but with a "back into the game" time of a nanosecond. Seriously, when you can dive RIGHT back into the action literally just by hitting ONE button with NO load times, you WANT to keep playing, dying, and playing again.

[Great Rumbler]

Perfect Dark was a big-budget title with tons of press/hype, though...

[Dark Jaguar]

So was Ocarina of Time, but not nearly as big as those games. I get what you mean, I'm just saying that to me AAA meant something else.

[A Black Falcon]

The idea is that of course only the biggest budget games are actually worth getting, or something... yeah, as if that's ever been true.