BioWare pumped a huge amount of advertising capital into the ME franchise to achieve those sales, including a full out prime time television advertising campaign in the US. Various articles reported BioWare and EA expected much greater sales than this; a reasonable expectation given the huge advertising campaign and in view of 10 million plus sales for Skyrim and the higher sales achieved by the two Fallout releases.
Maybe a little disappointed but they won't be upset with the figures. It's still a massive success for Bioware. No rpg company comes close to Bethesda sales, the closest company that does is Bioware and they're well behind.
Blizzard I suppose, if you can call Diablo an RPG
A substantial portion of ME3 purchasers are not happy with the franchise and won't be buying on the next round.
That's an exaggeration. There was vocal minority that caused a stir, but as I said before Bethesda suffered a similar backlash with Oblivion and smashed all records with Skyrim. Also a lot of the people put off by the ending were (somewhat) appeased with the free DLC expansion. The ME fanbase is in a healthy position.
The Old Republic turned out to be the disaster that had been widely predicted in the industry.
TOR made a profit, so it's hardly a disaster. They'd have definately have liked to have moved more units for sure, but they've got a solid base to work with. Will see what happens after they move FTP.
DA2 dlc and a planned DA2 expansion were flat out cancelled earlier this year (undoubtedly due to flagging sales). This simply isn't a good performance by anyone's standards.
DA2 was a disaster, no question. It looked like most of the talent was moved to different companies. They've got a lot of work to do for DA3 but initial impressions look promising (area will span a much larger area than DA:O, no reused dungeons, etc etc etc). If they stuff DA3 they may as well scrap the franchise so it looks like they're being VERY cautious with it, which is good. Nothing like the threat of the unemployment queue for producing good work.
Moore's comment is simply a case of management trying to put a happy spin on an unhappy situation. Rally the troops until they can figure out their next move.
The situation was never as bad as the haters on the internet would let you believe. Despite everything that was said, ME3 outperformed ME2 by a fairly large margin, and a lot of the people upset with the original ending were pacified with the free DLC. TOR did turn a profit, it may have been small and a massive blow considering they were looking to dominate the Online RPG market, but that was never going to be achieved. DA2 was terrible but still moved over a million units. To put that in perspective, that's a little fewer than the Witcher 2.
I have no idea where all the doom and gloom forecasts about Bioware have come from, they've actually done fairly decent. They're in a much better position now than just before they merged with EA. I believe 2 of the last games they released just before the merger were Jade Empire (which flopped I think) and Sonic (which was terrible). And it seemed like they were running into money issues.
. Never would have thought it would have reached the 6 million mark. 3-3.5 million copies of ME3 sounds aboutright, which would mean that the ME frachise is steadily growing. Moore can't help but be pleased with that.
