#game sales

[khorren]

It's time for my quarterly shilling "oh hey look, sales" Guild Wars post. Yay!

Sales on expansions and content for Guild Wars 2: - The complete Elder Dragon Saga collection (3 expacs, 4 living world seasons) is down from 100 bucks to 50 bucks. This doesn't include the latest expansion, Secrets of the Obscure. - Path of Fire with Heart of Thorns thrown in free (as always) is down from 30 bucks to 7.50. - And there's other sales too but those are the ones most people will take advantage of. The "buy almost everything" pack and the "Hm, not sure if I'll like this, but hey, 7 something bucks"

I highly recommend buying / playing GW2 from the anet launcher and not getting it on steam for various reasons I can go into if you're curious.

Living World seasons are on sale for a further 20% off, bringing it down to 36% off!

The deluxe upgrades for HoT, PoF, and EoD are on sale in game, and the HoT + PoF ones are both an insanely good deal. If you don't have them check 'em out. It's less than a price of a character slot, and you get a character slot and a bunch of goodies. (if you get the HoT one, your guild of your choice will 100% appreciate the vine wall guild hall decoration)

Finally, Guild Wars (one) stuff is on sale for 75% off on both steam and the Guild Wars 1 store.

GW1 is a verrrrrrrrryy different game to GW2, but if you're interested in the lore / world of Tyria a long time ago before GW2 check it out. Also as long as you're not playing GW2 on steam, you can link your GW1 account to your GW2 account and get some goodies over in GW2. Skins, titles, pets. All fluff, but a lot of people like this sort of thing :D You can buy GW1 on sale either on Steam (Trilogy and eye of the north is what you want) or via the GW1 shop (Complete Collection is what you want)

Sales run until the 21st of March :)

[askagamedev]

Ascendant Studios just cut close to half of their staff within a month of release of their debut title Immortals of Aveum. You've shared before that devs will have down time between pre release to post release if new projects isn't in full production. Is this timeline normal or what else can you infer from the cuts?

Usually when a game launches, we know really quickly whether the actual sales are trending at, above, or below the expected numbers and roughly by how far off we are. After the first few days, we can extrapolate the estimated sales trajectory the game will have. If a game meets or goes above expectations, everything is great. If the game fails to hit expectations, the real question is "by how much?" - a small shortfall is surmountable, but a large shortfall basically spells doom for a lot of studios. The worse the numbers are, the faster the company moves to secure its survival - mass layoffs can come just days or weeks after the game's launch. When you've got hundreds of employees each costing thousands of dollars per month, you're looking at literal millions of dollars being spent on salaries per month alone. Even large famous publisher-owned studios are typically only 2-3 bad flops away from closure.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that Immortals of Aveum didn't hit anywhere close to the sales numbers they needed/expected to hit with the game launch. The new sales forecast, given the initial numbers and expected falloff over time as we head into the holiday season, means that thoughts of a sequel and/or ongoing content updates no longer make financial sense. This, in turn, means that they cannot afford to keep paying all of the developers on the team and still keep the company afloat. Faced with the possibility of the entire studio closing down, they made the horrible choice to lay off half of the studio in hopes that the remaining staff will be able to get them to sustainability. The future plans for Aveum were scrapped and they're likely scrambling to figure out how to keep the lights on at Ascendant Studios altogether.

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[diversegaminglists]

Frogware games recently got back control of their own game (it's a long story involving a publisher refusing to pay them and stealing it), which means the intended final version and all the DLCs are now available again.

It's also on steam, but I used the gog link because it's currently 70% off.

17th January 2024.

[thesonicstadium]

📈 The #SonicTheHedgehog franchise is on a HIGH as SEGA Sammy's latest Investor Report reveals the series has shifted 1.6 BILLION units as of Mar 2023 - an increase of 7% year on year! #SonicNews

[freshiegayboi]

what a time to not have 15 bucks XD

[yunoteru4ever]

Hey, you got any info on the sales regarding the visual novel, and its remake? Just trying to see how successful/well known it might have been for Japan.

I didn't have any info at all when you sent this, but after digging deeper on the matter, I can safely say: I still don't have any solid info. :P

I mostly tried searching Japanese sites for any discussion on or reference to "未来日記13人目の日記所有者" sales numbers, and I came up completely dry. All I can tell you is two things:

We have to logically assume that the existence of the enhanced/expanded "RE:WRITE" re-release implies that the first release was profitable enough to justify putting in that additional work + manufacturing the new production run. So I presume the first release was "successful"... even if we have no idea what the metric of said "success" would be.

VGChartz estimates about 10,000 units of the "RE:WRITE" version were sold through to customers — though that's ofc based on VGChartz's notoriously unreliable methodoogy :P

(For anyone unaware: VGChartz reps speak directly to a small number of retail shops who are willing to repeatedly provide stas of their location's physical sales over a given period of time. From there, the VGChartz crew assumes that every similar retail location in that entire country had similar sales, so they simply multiply the initial data out x the number of similar retail shops in the nation, resulting in the extrapolated numbers by they print. Which is some pretty shitty logic. But because it's preferable to the absolutely zero data we most typically receive on game sales, people do still sometimes cite VGC's numbers as a possible baseline.)

Sorry I can't be of more help. If anyone else can track down any further information, please let us know!

[aquamarine-oceanfront]

A post about North American sales data for Klonoa 1 & 2

I can't really think of an introduction, so here are the key points of the full post for convenience's sake:

The NPD Group (now one half of Circana) has tracked video game sales in North America since 1995 - initially(?) integrating it into their Toy Research Survey Tracking (TRST) system, which tracked sales reported by 17 different retails comprising 63% of the North American market. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it's something, at least.

While the organization discouraged publishing the raw data, a random, long-dead website seems to have done just that for the months of December 2002 and January 2003.

According to the latter spreadsheet, by January 2003, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil had respectively sold 25,861 and 97,766 copies in their retail lifespans at that point. (I'm not entirely sure whether this is specifically for the US or North America more broadly.)

More details after the jump.

To set the scene, this excerpt from the April 1997 issue of Next Generation magazine provides a good explanation of how the TRST system works, including the potential pitfalls in its methodology:

Also worth noting is that Walmart stopped providing sales figures to TRST starting in July 2001, the same month Lunatea's Veil released in the US. (Toys R Us would follow suit in the middle of August 2003, though this is not especially relevant here.) This, naturally, is a fairly significant blind spot in the data - by February 2012, when Walmart resumed providing numbers to the NPD Group, an analyst estimated the chain was responsible for 25-30% of video game sales in the US, and I have no reason to believe they weren't pulling similar numbers in the early 2000s.

Now, one may wonder how the public would've been able to get their hands on sales numbers that the Group insisted on keeping private. In this case, the answer is a random, long-defunct website republishing two spreadsheets claiming to have TRST data for video games sold in December 2002 and January 2003. I can't verify the accuracy of these web pages myself, but given their age I suspect it'd be difficult to decisively prove it either way. Plus, aside from some simple yet odd date typos in the 2003 spreadsheet, from what I've read they seem official and plausible - not to mention reasonably comprehensive.

With all that buildup out of the way, here are what I believe may be some of (if not the only) publicly-accessible sales figures for Door to Phantomile and Lunatea's Veil in North America (or at least the US).

The original spreadsheet for December 2002 puts Door to Phantomile quite a ways down, since it hadn't sold any copies that month. Nevertheless, it does give us a figure for the copies it'd sold in its lifetime (beginning with its release in March 1998): 25,851.

Lunatea's Veil, a relatively current release, fares better. Between July 2001 and December 2002, TRST's data says it sold 97,220 copies, with 1,138 being sold that month alone. The numbers on the right (rounded to two decimal places) indicate that, for the month of December 2002, it was sold for an average of $28.18 and brought in a total of $32,066.35.

Now we progress to January 2003. Unsurprisingly, Door to Phantomile did not sell any additional copies that month, remaining exactly as it was.

Lunatea's Veil sold 546 more copies, however, bringing its total sales up to 97,766. As before, the two rightmost columns track its average price ($19.81) and the total amount of money it brought in ($10,814.42), both specifically for January 2003. However, the two asterisks next to the latter number indicate that it may be inaccurate, so please take it with a larger grain of salt than the rest of the data.

I must admit I don't really have a conclusion here, outside of the obvious ways to interpret this data (the first game sold poorly, the second one did better but not exceptionally). If you have anything to add, please feel free to!

[sometranssoup]

Hey all,figured I'd let you know that South Park:Stick Of Truth is only $8.99 USD on the switch eShop right now so if you've been putting it off bc $30 USD is too expensive,GET IT

[wingwaver]

as of right now (March 15th 2023) the Digimon Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory bundle is on sale on the Switch for $9.99!

[yusuke-of-valla]

[lordpigbeetle]

The entire fallout series (sans 76 and BOS) is on a huge sale DRM free(!!!!) from GOG I'm slowly (whilst maintaining financial caution) rebuilding my library to be DRM free and I've been keeping my eyes on this for weeks waiting for them to drop, so I am v happy about this!!

(And if you particulalrly like the draw of achievements, you can still collect them if you play through GOG Galaxy)

[moonpiesanctuaryupdates]

[insertdisc5]

my two timeloop RPGs, START AGAIN: a prologue and In Stars and Time, are on sale during Steam's Summer Sale!

if you like stories about being stuck in a timeloop and being Totally Fine About It, those babies are for you ✨✨✨

[legitimatesatanspawn]

Friends during every major season sale:

Not counting the one friend who looks at the sales and declares there's nothing good on sale every time.

As for me, I tend to compile a multi-page spreadsheet of items on sale and figuring out how to balance any of their existing packages/bundles on the site for maximum savings based on the order of purchase:

I'm serious by the way. For example the RPG Bundle containing CrossCode, Ara Fell, and Bug Fables it is cheaper to get that Bundle first then the CrossCode bundle for the post-game dlc by $2 than getting CrossCode then Bug Fables and Ara Fell (all three of which I highly recommend for different reasons and styles of rpgs). Either way you're spending about $20-22 for 3 games instead of $26 or the full price of $66. Admittedly it isn't a big drop but some bundles are actually cheaper than getting on game alone... like the insane fact that Octopath 2 is about $3.50 cheaper if you get the two game bundle containing Various Daylife.

We won't get into the insanity that are the Xenoverse games and 2's dlc sets, the Koei Tecmo titles, or god forbid Truck Sim games and their never ending pile of dlc. Fans of the Truck Sim games must be very happy but good god the sheer number of dlc is rather intimidating.

[housederiva]

Here's BG3's Sven Vinckle's speech before he announced the game of the year, it's something I think certain companies should keep in mind going forward... (also sorry for the 'yes' that's yelled in the background during it, I didn't realize I projected that much from where I was seated. I got happy about developers striving to be treated as people making art and not ticks on a spreadsheet trying to make ceo's more money)