Anthem sales are bad? $100m just in
digital revenues in a month. Anthem is making profits with just its digital sales, EA isn't losing money on it.
Not making a point about any specific agenda here, but just fact-checking the statistics. The article states that Anthem is the second
fastest selling game in their history. I've no idea if 100m is a good figure or not, but the article suggests that most of that has come from day-one-purchases at the $60 mark, which would equate to approximately 1.66m people. Call it 2m for rounding and the time since the article, etc. If you look at the number of players rather than revenue, then 2m isn't that big a splash in the AAA world.
And there has been a gruadual uptick in 'fastest' sales ever since EA took over. DA2 was the first title of theirs to have really huge day-one-purchases only to then trail off really sharply in the following weeks/months to the point where Dragon Age: Origins was actually still the more played game.
Mass Effect 3 became their fastest selling game, Dragon Age Inquisition became their fastest selling game, Anthem is being touted as a nearly fastest ever selling game, but you don't really see the company telling anyone about long-term player numbers. The concept of 'fastest' is merely the number that is used to keep people positive & is more an indication of how well their marketing team performed than how well the game performed.
I also bring this up because you state:
we got a thread just like this one back in early 2018 about it.
& I also notice repetition of points in threads. I've no doubt Bioware's next game, assuming there's a next game, will also be very fast selling for a few weeks with people reporting that everything's great because they convinced enough people to day-one-purchase it in the months leading up to release. And then there'll be threads asking why the game is dissappointing & some people saying hey, it sold well, what's your problem etc.
Further, of course numbers go up every year anyway regardless of everything else, the market is still growing as gaming becomes more global and more mainsteam with each new generation. 2m players buying your console game today isn't even remotely similar to 1m people buying your PC game 20 years ago in terms of market domination and public perception. But it could well still be enough to allow them to make another game. If there's 2m people out there, of which you are no doubt one, who are really happy about day-one-purchasing a Bioware game, then I see no reason why your demand shouldn't be met. I don't envy the miserey you have to go through on forums every time one does get released though, but that's the risk developers take when they put
everything into ensuring the day-one-purchases are the only important factor in the game's development.
