Preview Wasteland 2 Preview in GameStar Magazine

[Roguey]

Fuck how many people are playing. Let's see how many people are buying.

A rough rule of thumb is to multiply the number of concurrent users by 5-10. SR had at most about 24,000 so I'd guesstimate sales to be about 120,000-240,000.

 

[Infinitron]

Fuck how many people are playing. Let's see how many people are buying.

A rough rule of thumb is to multiply the number of concurrent users by 5-10. SR had at most about 24,000 so I'd guesstimate sales to be about 120,000-240,000.

I've heard of that, but I don't know how accurate it is so close to release.

 

[Ramireza]

I hope will Wasteland 2 will trick console gaming Fallout 3ers and their kiddy allowance

This realy could happen!

I showed the WL2 Gameplay Video to my 16 year old cousin, and he said : "Wow, just like Fallout 3! When this game will be released?". After i told him that this game is TURNED BASED and have tons of unvoiced text to read he stares at me with with empty, "popamoled" eyes, closed the browser window and never talked about Wasteland 2 again.

BTW : He gave up Baldurs Gate during the character creation too.

 

[Duraframe300]

I wouldn't see it that negativly and I think you are going to be surprised on Shadowruns sales. As a counter argument, you just have to look at Wasteland 2's backer numbers and think about how much of a fraction that is of potential buyers.

Because I doubt that precentage is big.

You are being overly optimistic. First compare Fallout's 80.000 v.s. Baldur's Gate's million(s) of sold copies. Then think how many of those have "graduated" from PC gaming by now. Finish off by having a look at how many people actually play Shadowrun now, after the launch weekend.
The cRPG gamer niche is small today.

It's small compared to consoles, but it is bigger than it was 15 years ago. The market has grown, and while PC Gaming is a niche, it doesn't mean that niche hasn't grown as well.

And steam *playing* numbers aren't a great comparison since it only counts the players that actually play last I checked.

So, you would have to assume that every buyer plays at the same time (Which *time zones* pretty much assure isn't the case)

 

[tindrli]

I think it's never legal to scan articles and publish them on the internet, unless the copyright owner explicitly says it is.

you can do it anyway Bro, we wont tell anybody


ITS A GOD DAMN WASTELAND 2 it will sell!!!! Maybe im too optimistic but with proper marketing i think about 500k in a first year at least..

 

[mindx2]

a faction built around worshipping Ronald Reagan as a god

Sounds like the modern day Republican party here in the Kwa.

HEY!

is second only to

!!


:D

 

[Kem0sabe]

I hope will Wasteland 2 will trick console gaming Fallout 3ers and their kiddy allowance

If they put the time into an awesome trailer that doesn't show any actual gameplay and with a known actor doing the voice over... *dramatic voice* Make your enemy explode like a blood sausage.

I can actually see a lot of bioware/bethesda fans buying it.

 

[Ramireza]

i think about 500k in a first year at least..

If this happens this could be the real breakthrough for the Kickstarter/cRPG´s (again). Imagine the possibilities : More money for such games, full voiced over dialoges, cinematic sequenzes, Frostbite Egine, FPS Gameplay, modern UI´s... a Dream come true and the REAL incline!

 

[Delterius]

i think about 500k in a first year at least..

If this happens this could be the real breakthrough for the Kickstarter/cRPG´s (again). Imagine the possibilities : More money for such games, full voiced over dialoges, cinematic sequenzes, Frostbite Egine, FPS Gameplay, modern UI´s... a Dream come true and the REAL incline!

 

[undecaf]

i think about 500k in a first year at least..

If this happens this could be the real breakthrough for the Kickstarter/cRPG´s (again). Imagine the possibilities : More money for such games, full voiced over dialoges, cinematic sequenzes, Frostbite Egine, FPS Gameplay, modern UI´s... a Dream come true and the REAL incline!

What a dark and fatalistic mind you have.

 

[tindrli]

i think about 500k in a first year at least..

If this happens this could be the real breakthrough for the Kickstarter/cRPG´s (again). Imagine the possibilities : More money for such games, full voiced over dialoges, cinematic sequenzes, Frostbite Egine, FPS Gameplay, modern UI´s... a Dream come true and the REAL incline!

What a dark and fatalistic mind you have.

lets see
- More money for such games. if you mean turn based isometric RPG then its a
- full voiced over dialoges. Unnecessary, what matters among others is a good story and AI
- cinematic sequenzes. Usless Throwing money.. Imagination is a way to go ( and the good story is all that we need )
- Frostbyte Engine. I dont know what it is but seems like "unity" is doing just fine nowadays
- FPS Gameplay. if you meant "First person shooter then you should kill yourself.
- Modern UI. I dont know what to say .. there will always be people that like and disslike UI.. the way to go is to make it moddable so people can make it as they prefer






i wonder.. did any Codex Bro asked for a a preview copy??

if not its a damn shame coz CODEX is like Mother of RPG-s and WE SHOULD HAVE PREVIEW COPY

 

[Necroscope]

cinematic sequenzes

 

[Ramireza]

i think about 500k in a first year at least..

If this happens this could be the real breakthrough for the Kickstarter/cRPG´s (again). Imagine the possibilities : More money for such games, full voiced over dialoges, cinematic sequenzes, Frostbite Egine, FPS Gameplay, modern UI´s... a Dream come true and the REAL incline!

 

[Delterius]

i think about 500k in a first year at least..

If this happens this could be the real breakthrough for the Kickstarter/cRPG´s (again). Imagine the possibilities : More money for such games, full voiced over dialoges, cinematic sequenzes, Frostbite Egine, FPS Gameplay, modern UI´s... a Dream come true and the REAL incline!

 

[Ramireza]

i think about 500k in a first year at least..

If this happens this could be the real breakthrough for the Kickstarter/cRPG´s (again). Imagine the possibilities : More money for such games, full voiced over dialoges, cinematic sequenzes, Frostbite Egine, FPS Gameplay, modern UI´s... a Dream come true and the REAL incline!

 

[DeepOcean]

Paradox games sells well enough to keep them afloat and almost alll their games are inacessible buggy spreadsheet simulators. So, why Wasteland 2 will sell like shit? I don't expect AAA numbers but 500.000 is something possible.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Boyarsky, Cain and Anderson formed Troika in 1998 after leaving Interplay where they created the classic RPG Fallout. Troika only created three games in the past six years: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), The Temple of Elemental Evil (2003) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004). These games catered to the niche RPG market, and although most were well received critically, the titles simply failed to generate enough revenue for the studio to survive. Arcanum was the company's best selling game, and it only managed to sell 234K units and generate sales of $8.8 million, according to the NPD Group. It was downhill from there; The Temple of Elemental Evil sold 128K units ($5.2 million) and Bloodlines sold a paltry 72K units ($3.4 million). It didn't help either that Bloodlines, which was published by Activision and powered by the Source/Half-Life 2 engine, was released at the same time as Valve's blockbuster first-person shooter sequel.​

Arcanum - 234K

The Temple of Elemental Evil - 128K

Bloodlines - 72K

Not sure what the time frame is on those sales numbers, but apart from Arcanum, those are pretty known ip's, and Bloodlines actually benefited from a lot of press for the simple fact it used source.

 

[DeepOcean]

Fuck how many people are playing. Let's see how many people are buying.

A rough rule of thumb is to multiply the number of concurrent users by 5-10. SR had at most about 24,000 so I'd guesstimate sales to be about 120,000-240,000.

So, even by those parameters Shadowrun returns sales revenue is something between 2million and 4 million dollars not counting mobile and future steam sales, nothing bad for a game that costed nothing for the developers to make.

 

[Burning Bridges]

This realy could happen!

I showed the WL2 Gameplay Video to my 16 year old cousin, and he said : "Wow, just like Fallout 3! When this game will be released?". After i told him that this game is TURNED BASED and have tons of unvoiced text to read he stares at me with with empty, "popamoled" eyes, closed the browser window and never talked about Wasteland 2 again.

BTW : He gave up Baldurs Gate during the character creation too.

I have a nephew that age, who plays Runes of Magic. Well actually, I just see him sitting in front of the PC and talk via teamspeak, consuming cola and crisps. But I have shown him games like JA2 or ToEE so I got an idea what "popamoled eyes" are. Anyway, it feels less of a triumph now than a few years ago. Nowadays he acts with such an air of .. indifference, superiority even, as if he already understands that he and his kind are over a billion, and people like us perhaps 10,000. I don't think he would play WL2.

 

[DeepOcean]

Boyarsky, Cain and Anderson formed Troika in 1998 after leaving Interplay where they created the classic RPG Fallout. Troika only created three games in the past six years: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), The Temple of Elemental Evil (2003) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004). These games catered to the niche RPG market, and although most were well received critically, the titles simply failed to generate enough revenue for the studio to survive. Arcanum was the company's best selling game, and it only managed to sell 234K units and generate sales of $8.8 million, according to the NPD Group. It was downhill from there; The Temple of Elemental Evil sold 128K units ($5.2 million) and Bloodlines sold a paltry 72K units ($3.4 million). It didn't help either that Bloodlines, which was published by Activision and powered by the Source/Half-Life 2 engine, was released at the same time as Valve's blockbuster first-person shooter sequel.​

Arcanum - 234K

The Temple of Elemental Evil - 128K

Bloodlines - 72K

Not sure what the time frame is on those sales numbers, but apart from Arcanum, those are pretty known ip's, and Bloodlines actually benefited from a lot of press for the simple fact it used source.

And they costed full AAA price upon launch, didn't received the same exposure as Wasteland 2 kickstarter and there was no digital market at that time. Bloodlines in particular was a buggy mess upon launch, was released along side with Half life 2 by the usual wisdom of Activision, Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum had no marketing (when I first saw them I thought it was some shitty unknown RPGs made by unknown shitty developers) and were both really unpolished and plagued by bugs upon launch. Troika was fucked many times by publishers, they didn't saw huge sales potential on cRPGs and didn't gave much support in term of marketing and QA to any of those three . Imagine how much sales Wasteland 2 is going to get and how much delicious butthurt by frustrated Biodrones we are going to get?

 

[Burning Bridges]

Boyarsky, Cain and Anderson formed Troika in 1998 after leaving Interplay where they created the classic RPG Fallout. Troika only created three games in the past six years: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), The Temple of Elemental Evil (2003) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004). These games catered to the niche RPG market, and although most were well received critically, the titles simply failed to generate enough revenue for the studio to survive. Arcanum was the company's best selling game, and it only managed to sell 234K units and generate sales of $8.8 million, according to the NPD Group. It was downhill from there; The Temple of Elemental Evil sold 128K units ($5.2 million) and Bloodlines sold a paltry 72K units ($3.4 million). It didn't help either that Bloodlines, which was published by Activision and powered by the Source/Half-Life 2 engine, was released at the same time as Valve's blockbuster first-person shooter sequel.

Arcanum - 234K

The Temple of Elemental Evil - 128K

Bloodlines - 72K

Not sure what the time frame is on those sales numbers, but apart from Arcanum, those are pretty known ip's, and Bloodlines actually benefited from a lot of press for the simple fact it used source.

But they were sold for full price. I they could have sold for 5 - 10 $ over todays digital platforms the sales would have to be much higher, perhaps 10 fold.

 

[tuluse]

You are being overly optimistic. First compare Fallout's 80.000 v.s. Baldur's Gate's million(s) of sold copies. Then think how many of those have "graduated" from PC gaming by now. Finish off by having a look at how many people actually play Shadowrun now, after the launch weekend.

The cRPG gamer niche is small today. If you want to get to several hundreds of thousands copies sold -territory, you have to reach the gamers who are not interested in the genre in the first place. Sometimes you can do that on Steam with the hype (hey, 'dissa top seller, messa buy, messa make Lord Gaben happy!), but I wouldn't count on that.



I think a big reason why all of those sold so much because they reached the critical point: top sales, lots of hype, cheap price.

Check how many people who bought them have actually played the games they bought. It always makes one wonder how long they'll keep making spur of the moment purchases like that.

I thought Fallout sold around 200 thousand copies.

 

[tuluse]

Boyarsky, Cain and Anderson formed Troika in 1998 after leaving Interplay where they created the classic RPG Fallout. Troika only created three games in the past six years: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), The Temple of Elemental Evil (2003) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004). These games catered to the niche RPG market, and although most were well received critically, the titles simply failed to generate enough revenue for the studio to survive. Arcanum was the company's best selling game, and it only managed to sell 234K units and generate sales of $8.8 million, according to the NPD Group. It was downhill from there; The Temple of Elemental Evil sold 128K units ($5.2 million) and Bloodlines sold a paltry 72K units ($3.4 million). It didn't help either that Bloodlines, which was published by Activision and powered by the Source/Half-Life 2 engine, was released at the same time as Valve's blockbuster first-person shooter sequel.​

Arcanum - 234K

The Temple of Elemental Evil - 128K

Bloodlines - 72K

Not sure what the time frame is on those sales numbers, but apart from Arcanum, those are pretty known ip's, and Bloodlines actually benefited from a lot of press for the simple fact it used source.

So the only full featured rpg™ on the list sold between 200-200k copies. Right where Fargo wants to be.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Imagine how much sales Wasteland 2 is going to get and how much delicious butthurt by frustrated Biodrones we are going to get?

It's possible, but I think most biodrones are not that stupid. There are going to be more complaints if people are given the game as a freebie. I remember when Amazon Vine gave out free copies of Ageods American Civil War, the reviews were beyond retarded.

 

[likaq]

Boyarsky, Cain and Anderson formed Troika in 1998 after leaving Interplay where they created the classic RPG Fallout. Troika only created three games in the past six years: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), The Temple of Elemental Evil (2003) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004). These games catered to the niche RPG market, and although most were well received critically, the titles simply failed to generate enough revenue for the studio to survive. Arcanum was the company's best selling game, and it only managed to sell 234K units and generate sales of $8.8 million, according to the NPD Group. It was downhill from there; The Temple of Elemental Evil sold 128K units ($5.2 million) and Bloodlines sold a paltry 72K units ($3.4 million). It didn't help either that Bloodlines, which was published by Activision and powered by the Source/Half-Life 2 engine, was released at the same time as Valve's blockbuster first-person shooter sequel.​

Arcanum - 234K

The Temple of Elemental Evil - 128K

Bloodlines - 72K

Not sure what the time frame is on those sales numbers, but apart from Arcanum, those are pretty known ip's, and Bloodlines actually benefited from a lot of press for the simple fact it used source.

And they costed full AAA price upon launch, didn't received the same exposure as Wasteland 2 kickstarter and there was no digital market at that time. Bloodlines in particular was a buggy mess upon launch, was released along side with Half life 2 by the usual wisdom of Activision, Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum had no marketing (when I first saw them I thought it was some shitty unknown RPGs made by unknown shitty developers) and were both really unpolished and plagued by bugs upon launch. Troika was fucked many times by publishers, they didn't saw huge sales potential on cRPGs and didn't gave much support in term of marketing and QA to any of those three . Imagine how much sales Wasteland 2 is going to get and how much delicious butthurt by frustrated Biodrones we are going to get?

This.

And, btw those numbers 234k, 128k, 72k are NDP sales figures. There are from March 2005 .US retail copies only. In other worlds they have very little value as a tool to measure how W2 can sell in the future.