The Mad Hanar wrote...
Mdoggy1214 wrote...
( ...But if you asked me what's more important, how much money a franchise makes or how good it is, i would tell you the quality is more important. And Mass Effect definitely is having an issue of quality with a lot of people.)
And that is why you are not the one selling these games and making the decisions about them. I'm not trying to be mean or condenscending, but that's the truth. Of course as the consumer you feel the quality is more important than the money made. That is not what matters to EA or Bioware, however.
Despite the endings, Mass Effect 3 sold 4.48 million copies worldwide across all platforms. Mass Effect 2 sold 4.49 million copies. That means that despite all the controversy surrounding this game, despite fans saying that the quality of the games went down, the same amount of money is made.
Still don't think this is relevant? Call of Duty, a series that is constantly ripped on even by it's fans, sold 11.50 million copies, just on the Xbox 360 alone. Year in and year out people complain about the lack of innovation this series displays and yet they still buy it year in and year out.
As for the quality of the games being an issue to a lot of people, the Child's Play donation pool done by Retake a year ago made about $80,000. That translates to about 1,333 sales, if your base price is $60. One of the original polls about the ending had 68,177 people saying that they completely disliked the original ending to Mass Effect 3, that is 1.5% of the total sales of the game. That's a 1.5% loss in sales, assuming that those who were unsatisfied really wouldn't buy another Mass Effect game. In the grand scheme of things, that is not a lot.
This series still has a great earning potential. I don't see it going anywhere any time soon.
Just a few things though.
1. The sales for ME2 and ME3 are almost identical. Now that is no surprise and makes sense, if you played ME2 you probably want to know how it continues, so this can be expected. Even if you read that the ending isn't great you probably would have bought ME3 anyhow to judge for yourself. Since noone was even remotely pissed at the ending of ME2 this is not an indicator as to how well a ME4 would do.
2. Just using the total amount of people voting in the poll and comparing it to total sales doesn'T work, since only a small percentage votes in the first place. Almost 70k people seems significant to me. So to get an indicator you must compare it to how many people voted, not bought it. For example (I don't have the numbers) if 80k people participated in the poll, and 70k were pissed at the endings.......that would have me worried if I plan to sell a ME4 in the near future.
My point is, as long as you are not a huge disappointment customers tend to be very loyal to products they know and like, even if there is sometimes a weaker installment, see your call of duty example. Yeah, it lacks innovation.....but still....people like it, people know it, people buy it.
However, if you are burned badly once, and let us not pretend that didn't happen here, customers are very unforgiving and it is almost impossible to win him/her back again. It takes years to build levels of trust and loyalty....it takes only one misstep to loose all that, and imho that happened here.
So, a far better indicator would probably be ME3 DLC sales compared to ME2 DLC sales (and those might still be off, considering how many are probably buy DLCs just in hopes the story will make more sense).
Modifié par Atekimagus, 18 février 2013 - 07:31 .
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