OK. So no actual link to actual sales numbers. Just made up, pulled numbers out of my ass numbers. That is some fucking quality Professional Gaming Journalism™ right there....
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The Mass Effect 3/BioWare Thread
- Thread starter Wyrmlord
- Start date
OK. So no actual link to actual sales numbers. Just made up, pulled numbers out of my ass numbers. That is some fucking quality Professional Gaming Journalism™ right there....
It is a reasonable extrapolation, given the number of units sold and knowing the price of those units. It is basic math, and the kind of estimation that is done all the time in the game industry (and other industries). It is not like EA can simply lie in their documents. They are a publicly traded company. If ME3 was a massive failure, we would know about it.
I mean, 890,000 units times, what, $59.00 USD or whatever? That was in the first 24 hours. That's 52.5 million in one day of sales. 200 is cake from there.
You need ACTUAL numbers to start an extrapolation. No just made up fucking guesses.
I can make up numbers and pull them from my ass also.
That said, the fact EA is continuing the Mass Effect series proves only one thing: It is *currently* a profitable franchise. What those exact numbers are, you have no fucking clue.
But with not a single person from BioWare working on ME4 (the new studio is just some studio slapped with the BioWare label, of which EA is renowned for) I don't expect much success from it. However they might just be targeting a certain demographic (retards) and it may sell well enough.... I don't think we will see anything of any depth, of which some of the stories that Weekes wrote for it. As one small example. Of which, were the best moments of all of the series.
Ninjerk
Arcane
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- Jul 10, 2013
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- 14,323
Wasn't everything but the ending universally acclaimed?
Lhynn
Arcane
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- 9,894
Until critics started picking it apart.
Dont get me wrong, ME3 did have some good parts, but most of it was shit compared to the previous games. Also a lot of the people claimed that they were done with the franchise because of that last "5%" being so utterly broken.
And lets not forget that DA2 came before it, and it was mostly shit too. If you ask me they are losing their reputation as the best writers in the gaming industry, and deservedly so. They are under EA so i dont doubt well get more scandals that will decrease the value of that company even further.
All speculation of course, but it is what i believe.
Tom Selleck
Arcane
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- May 6, 2013
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- 1,213
Wasn't Mac Walters more responsible for writing that ending? Like, wasn't there a note that said "lots of speculation from everyone" and "don't forget to wash hands after using the peepee seat" that was by him?
Or am I conflating Walters and Hudson?
Or am I conflating Walters and Hudson?
SwiftCrack
Arcane
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- Oct 3, 2012
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- 1,836
Necroscope
Arcane
AW8
Arcane
Finally, Casey Hudson is forcefully removed from office by the people.
That would be hilarious, seeing as he got in trouble after criticizing Hudson and Walters for locking themselves in a room and writing the ME3 ending themselves.
That would be hilarious, seeing as he got in trouble after criticizing Hudson and Walters for locking themselves in a room and writing the ME3 ending themselves.
Bliblablubb
Arcane
I will mostly remember ME 3 as an example how the rest of the game didn't hold up expectations created by the trailers and press demos. The big announcement that the music will be done by Clint Mansell? He did the piano piece when leaving earth (trailer music you could say) and another at the end of the game. The rest was done by the usual (good) artists. The press mostly got to play the mars mission, that I consider on of the game's best. Especially because of the music. After that mission even the songs started getting more lackluster and the game went downhill (exeption being Tuchanka, but the cutscenes show it was done very early during development). It just felt like they made a few good missions, then had to fill the rest somehow.
To me a game's music is very important. Enough to give or remove an extra troll from/to the score. ME1 had some good songs, ME2 had a LOT of good songs. That's why I consider ME2, despite all it's flaws, the best from the trilogy. But ME3? Aside from the piece mentioned above, mars, plus a few not even on the soundtrack, nothing that stuck with me. When I think of ME2, I remember how well the final escape from the station worked along it's music.
How many songs do you remember from DA2? Even Inon Zur(?) said the music was a rushjob and it showed.
Think of BG 1/2, Fallout 1/2, PS:T, or KOTOR 1/2. You will at least remember the main theme or even more.
Now think of Twitcher 1/2... did those games even have music?
I still have the soundtrack of Mercenaries 2. A shitty game, but the music makes it better in my memory.
Bioware should concentrate on properly using the great assests they have, instead of trying to blind people with big names. Bethesda had the idea before you anyway.
To me a game's music is very important. Enough to give or remove an extra troll from/to the score. ME1 had some good songs, ME2 had a LOT of good songs. That's why I consider ME2, despite all it's flaws, the best from the trilogy. But ME3? Aside from the piece mentioned above, mars, plus a few not even on the soundtrack, nothing that stuck with me. When I think of ME2, I remember how well the final escape from the station worked along it's music.
How many songs do you remember from DA2? Even Inon Zur(?) said the music was a rushjob and it showed.
Think of BG 1/2, Fallout 1/2, PS:T, or KOTOR 1/2. You will at least remember the main theme or even more.
Now think of Twitcher 1/2... did those games even have music?
I still have the soundtrack of Mercenaries 2. A shitty game, but the music makes it better in my memory.
Bioware should concentrate on properly using the great assests they have, instead of trying to blind people with big names. Bethesda had the idea before you anyway.
Bliblablubb
Arcane
Maybe they reused a song on the shitadel for nostalgia reasons, but in ME2 every mission had it's own new song. The OST was huge. ME3 on the other hand reused a lot of songs.
Well give me a jewtube link to a memorable song from TW1/2 if you think there were good ones.
Well give me a jewtube link to a memorable song from TW1/2 if you think there were good ones.
Wat, The Witcher had some of the most memorable CRPG music that I can think of. Just before you go to bed tonight a band of Polish hussars will crash into your home with horses and all and throw unboiled potatoes at you whilst chanting "Kurwa kurwa" over and over again.
I should also say that I actually liked ME3, for what it was: a cover shooter. The powers were balanced pretty well and the gunplay was fun (if a tad easy). The story and the characters were all a dumb joke, which means powering through the cut scenes as fast as humanly possible. But that is easy, and the reward is some pretty good game play.
That's what always kills me about BW. Most of the time their game play is decent, they just fuck it up with a bunch of irrelevant/boring/pointless shit. Except for DA2, which sucked from all possible angles.
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- 2,998
I didn't make it past the first few hours of ME1 but I think this still hurts Bioware. The biggest reasons for the company's success (the Docs) are long gone, the guy who was largely responsible for DA:O's success (Knowles) is gone, and now the guy who spearheaded a lot of their success in the console market (KOTOR through ME3) is gone. EAWare isn't going to last long in its current form I think.
skyst
Augur
I agree that their gameplay can be quite good. Completing ME2&3 at max difficulty as the Vanguard class is just stupidly fun since you never use cover or any of that crap. Just biotic charge around from enemy to enemy, shotgunning their faces in. :kwafuckyeah:
I had a lot of fun with the combat in DA2 as well, also at max difficulty of course, despite the retardation of the rest of the game. And I guess my reasoning for enjoying it is pretty tarded too. I read it has been patched out now, but basically everything a 2h weapon fighter would do caused collateral damage that would hit allies in the vicinity, often 1 shotting them. You would think that would irritate a player but I laughed every single time I chopped down the stupid beardless Dwarf. Completing many of the harder encounters (a 20 minute brawl with some crystal or golem thing in the deep roads comes to mind) was really gratifying because they required and intense amount of concentration and no fuckuppery, at least for me.
Stainless Veteran
Arcane
And Russians as well, chanting, in turn, "cyka krysa pidor".
Azrael the cat
Arcane
Strikes me as very plausible. It's coming off a big selling ME1 and a huge-selling ME2. Sales measures for AAA games are taken mostly from the 1st two weeks plus pre-sales, especially for franchises i.e. whether players like the game (that they've already paid for) has almost no impact on the sales.
Customer dissatisfaction only seems to affect game sales in this industry if there's an extended decline over multiple games, where the commercial impact of customer disatisfaction tends to lag about 1-2 games behind the disatisfaction itself. It's not even a case of 'Fans hated Franchise-Man 2, so Franchiseman-3 will flop'. Rather, it's more a cumulative goodwill/hatred that decays over time, but with the franchise getting a 1-2 game window in which they can course-correct before it starts seriously hitting sales.
If you want to see what it would look like for Bioware (or their major franchises, assuming they don't just throw in the towel and stop supporting one of them, because 'they always really wanted DA to be a Minecraft clone but they just didn't have the technology back then') to buckle commercially, look at, say, Sonic. Okay, it was a much larger franchise than any crpg, but it's a good example of a franchise that went from critical flop to flop to flop (in terms of the reception from customers and major reviewers) while still having the full support of the developer/publisher and its marketing division. At no point did sales just drive off a cliff - even when the game's reception did. Years of sustained failure merely produced a slow, dull, decline.
I'm really curious what would happen if Sega now produced another decade of terrific Sonic games. Would there be a similar lag between goodwill and sales, such that it would take several successes to get any benefit out of it? I suspect gamers build goodwill more rapidly than hatred, so it might only take Bioware one well-received Mass Effect to offset the commercial effects of several hated entries in the franchise.
Either way, I think this is one of the reasons that developers sometimes misread the market so badly that what should be a 'slam dunk' sequel ends up being considered a sell-out by fans, while the designers just can't understand how it flopped. Game A+expansion are both well-received, so the developer and publisher take the franchise more seriously and seek to turn it into a mainstream mega-hit by making it more generic. The accumulated goodwill leads to even better sales for Game B, so the developer thinks the changes were really popular and they go all out CoD clone for Game C. Game C flops, the fans just don't care anymore, and the designers are scratching their heads thinking 'what the fuck just happened?'.
Azrael the cat
Arcane
Have any of those folk done anything (or started anything substanstial) since leaving?
Hepler joined a kickstarter project (a sci-fi romance game of course) which promptly plummeted in it's funding, crashed and burned.
I don't want to whore out my blog but I did some research on this in grad school. The preliminary data I was able to gather seems to suggest (though this is by no means certain) that games are a lot like movies: bad publicity is still good publicity. We know that when it comes to films, whether reviews are negative or positive is irrlevant to the film's financial success. The only metric that seems relevant is the volume of user reviews.
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