Bitcher said:
sea said:
and they'd like to make up for the game's retail failure as best they can.
:shock: You mean it flopped? Even with all that hype and marketing shoving it down our throats...
Didn't quite flop, but apparently it did less than 1 million across both consoles in its first month, and had a sharp fall-off after release. The development costs likely require at least 3-4 million sales to break even.
LA Noire, despite the ad campaign, uses an unconventional setting, has unconventional gameplay, and has no brand behind it to rely on. People know Grand Theft Auto, and GTA IV was a poster child for the Xbox 360's technology, plus it released at a very good time, once the sandbox game genre had already been established on modern consoles, but not really mastered. Red Dead Redemption was a sequel to a semi-successful game, but more importantly was easily marketed as "Grand Theft Auto: Wild West." Both those games had an instant leg up over an original property like LA Noire.
If LA Noire were a film, it would at least be up as Oscar bait and would have that to leverage it. The videogames industry does not have such awards to help give more unconventional and artistic titles that boost (also meaning there's less incentive to produce them), and on top of that videogames aren't yet at a point where a "smart" game that defies convention is able to really do big sales numbers in a way that warrants.
You basically need one of three things to have a chance at mainstream success: a developer that's a "household" name and will sell based on that (BioWare), a well-known license or game franchise, or some sort of original hook to stand out from the crowd that at the same time is able to be marketed as a spin on existing and established ideas ("like Call of Duty, but..."). LA Noire got the original ideas right (at least as far as games go, the 40s and 50s are mostly unexplored territory), but it was sold as "GTA: Noire" and the final game ended up being pretty different in the end. Add to that the natural obstacle of getting people to spend full price on a genre largely dominated these days by lower-priced games on the PC (Telltale especially), and I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised.
If Rockstar were smarter business-wise, they would have released it as a budget-priced downloadable to help test the waters for the gameplay and themes (possibly with a priority on PC, as there is a huge casual/budget market for adventure games), or would have basically turned it into a straight action game to appeal to the mass market's current expectations.