Fairly sure it's silly to respond to an old-ish story like this but...
For the sake of perspective (and one or two bits of evidence that idiots drive the market) here are some current figures related to some other popular titles:
Call of Duty Black Ops (all versions, pre-orders alone): over 4.5 million
Fable III (over 2 week period from release): 1.7 million
Wii Sports Resort: 19.5 million since launch (2.5 million in first 3 weeks)
Wii Sports: 66.6 million since launch (only 1.9 million in first 3 weeks)
Mass Effect 2 (PC+Xbox360 totals): Just over 2.5 million to date (2 million in first 2 weeks)
So this game, which is using a 4 year old (or older) engine and has be alternately called the greatest RPG in the last half-decade and the buggiest major reliest since Dungeon Lords (by far this is the minority opinion) is doing quite well compared to some of the best selling single-player only titles out there. It's also on par in initial sales to Fable III which many analysts expected to blow it out of the water since they've all fallen in love with anything that even remotely resembles social networking.
The bad news is that games with plot (good or bad) are destroyed in terms of life-time sales by anything that has you either playing with a plastic toy instrument or waving an white plastic weapon of mass LCD destruction. Is there any wonder why companies either cave to pressure to make their games more action-oriented and acessible or go out of business? I used to assume the reason that complex and challenging RPGs seemed like a dying breed was because people didn't appreciate them. That's not really the case though- it looks like many more people appreciate them than ever before. The problem is that when most of the game-development is done by large publicly traded companies that the choice on where to invest their time and money is between two games that cost roughly the same to produce (in the same order of magnitude at least) but where will potentially sell 6 million copies over its lifetime and the other one could sell over 60 million it's really a no-brainer. I mean that- it's basically an instict driven decision and in such a pathologically binary choice to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the shareholders' trust.
That case is actually more optimistic than the real situation a company like EA would be presented with. A thoughtful and expansive sucessor, even just a spiritual sucessor, to the best games of the Ultima series would cost far more to produce than a game where Weebles we customize to look like us (and must use the full force of our powers of immagination to pretend they do) spastically flap 8-polygon-count paddles at at crudely rendered tennis balls.
Despite what you may think of them, Bethesda and Bioware are likely the last of of their kind - producers of high production value single player RPGs. The only reason they continue to survive despite part of a publicly traded company in one case (EA-Bioware) and owned mostly by a group of very succesful investors in the other case (posted below because it's interesting) is that they act to hedge the bets in a way. Bioware and Bethesda serve a role similar to that of bonds in a diversified investment fund. They produce consistently profitable returns whether the economic times are good or bad, despite not producing the same massive returns that can be seen from games like Wii sports. Their products have long development cycles, but do not have the same recurring costs and continuing obligations that titles like World of Warcraft or even many multiplayer shooters do either. It's funny but I think the reason they are relatively consistently supported by their parent company in the case of Bioware and their investors in the case of Zenimax Media/Bethesda is because someone in each case realizes that not everyone can make Wii Sports and that maybe their pet pro-sports franchise isn't so invulnerable to competition as they would like it to be.
Oh and in case you were curious, here are the people who own Zenimax and Bethesda:
Robert A. Altman
Chairman & CEO
Ernest Del
President
Jerry Bruckheimer
Jerry Bruckheimer Films
Michael Dominguez
Managing Director, Providence Equity Partners Inc.
Leslie Moonves
President & CEO, CBS Corporation
Cal Ripken, Jr.
President & CEO, Ripken Baseball, Inc.
Harry E. Sloan
Chairman, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Robert S. Trump
President, Trump Management, Inc
Most of those guys are not on the list because they want to make what they consider to be good games so thank some unnamed but wise analyst somewhere that they do still try at least- even if you don't think they always pull it off.
For the sake of perspective (and one or two bits of evidence that idiots drive the market) here are some current figures related to some other popular titles:
Call of Duty Black Ops (all versions, pre-orders alone): over 4.5 million
Fable III (over 2 week period from release): 1.7 million
Wii Sports Resort: 19.5 million since launch (2.5 million in first 3 weeks)
Wii Sports: 66.6 million since launch (only 1.9 million in first 3 weeks)
Mass Effect 2 (PC+Xbox360 totals): Just over 2.5 million to date (2 million in first 2 weeks)
So this game, which is using a 4 year old (or older) engine and has be alternately called the greatest RPG in the last half-decade and the buggiest major reliest since Dungeon Lords (by far this is the minority opinion) is doing quite well compared to some of the best selling single-player only titles out there. It's also on par in initial sales to Fable III which many analysts expected to blow it out of the water since they've all fallen in love with anything that even remotely resembles social networking.
The bad news is that games with plot (good or bad) are destroyed in terms of life-time sales by anything that has you either playing with a plastic toy instrument or waving an white plastic weapon of mass LCD destruction. Is there any wonder why companies either cave to pressure to make their games more action-oriented and acessible or go out of business? I used to assume the reason that complex and challenging RPGs seemed like a dying breed was because people didn't appreciate them. That's not really the case though- it looks like many more people appreciate them than ever before. The problem is that when most of the game-development is done by large publicly traded companies that the choice on where to invest their time and money is between two games that cost roughly the same to produce (in the same order of magnitude at least) but where will potentially sell 6 million copies over its lifetime and the other one could sell over 60 million it's really a no-brainer. I mean that- it's basically an instict driven decision and in such a pathologically binary choice to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the shareholders' trust.
That case is actually more optimistic than the real situation a company like EA would be presented with. A thoughtful and expansive sucessor, even just a spiritual sucessor, to the best games of the Ultima series would cost far more to produce than a game where Weebles we customize to look like us (and must use the full force of our powers of immagination to pretend they do) spastically flap 8-polygon-count paddles at at crudely rendered tennis balls.
Despite what you may think of them, Bethesda and Bioware are likely the last of of their kind - producers of high production value single player RPGs. The only reason they continue to survive despite part of a publicly traded company in one case (EA-Bioware) and owned mostly by a group of very succesful investors in the other case (posted below because it's interesting) is that they act to hedge the bets in a way. Bioware and Bethesda serve a role similar to that of bonds in a diversified investment fund. They produce consistently profitable returns whether the economic times are good or bad, despite not producing the same massive returns that can be seen from games like Wii sports. Their products have long development cycles, but do not have the same recurring costs and continuing obligations that titles like World of Warcraft or even many multiplayer shooters do either. It's funny but I think the reason they are relatively consistently supported by their parent company in the case of Bioware and their investors in the case of Zenimax Media/Bethesda is because someone in each case realizes that not everyone can make Wii Sports and that maybe their pet pro-sports franchise isn't so invulnerable to competition as they would like it to be.
Oh and in case you were curious, here are the people who own Zenimax and Bethesda:
Robert A. Altman
Chairman & CEO
Ernest Del
President
Jerry Bruckheimer
Jerry Bruckheimer Films
Michael Dominguez
Managing Director, Providence Equity Partners Inc.
Leslie Moonves
President & CEO, CBS Corporation
Cal Ripken, Jr.
President & CEO, Ripken Baseball, Inc.
Harry E. Sloan
Chairman, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Robert S. Trump
President, Trump Management, Inc
Most of those guys are not on the list because they want to make what they consider to be good games so thank some unnamed but wise analyst somewhere that they do still try at least- even if you don't think they always pull it off.
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2006
- Messages
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