It sold like 4 million during its release weekend too. So it slowly limped around 6 million more sales after 2 years. For a flagship title, that's awful.
Yeah, GTA5 mind broke the industry. HZD and TLOU2 costing ~200-220 million to make is insane when you look at other games with much smaller budgets. The extra $100+ million they spend on all these small visual improvements that no one truly gives a fuck about is pushing all these studios to "go gangbusters to survive or go bankrupt because your 1 game after 7 years didn't sell insanely well."
You can look at several games on that chart that reached much lower net sales than HZD and TLOU2 but their budgets weren't even half the size of those 2 games, so they were likely far more profitable. It's why Nintendo has been dominating so hard. They don't dump massive budgets into their games so they can make more focused and frequent game releases, causing them to make bank when the games just do well. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe crossed 62 million copies sold and that budget was likely miniscule to half the shit being released nowadays.
The real issues in the industry is that there used to be games making 1/2 billion in sales regularly until fairly recently. That used to be only around 8.4 million units at full price. Normally a couple games a year would do that (net returns to the company was lower, obviously). But trying to get that WoW money took over. Now the 10 most popular games in a year are the same 9 and one hot game that year. It's wild how much as changed.
Though a note that the Xbox One / PS4 era brought Digital Catalogs right along with the death of the Rental Store. It's not really nostaliga for PS2/PS3 era that people have. It's the fact that a normal gamer on a basic budget could play 3-4 new games a month via cheap rentals at the store. If you were a kid in school, you could literally play a new game every weekend for just a couple of bucks. So the games didn't just move more units in previous eras, far larger numbers of people played them.
The quest to move all games to 60 frames per second and 4K resolution is a fools errand. Not because I am a luddite retrograde who enjoys Pong and Frogger, but because there isn't anything impressive to move the tech onwards. All you get are remasters of dreadful trash like TLOU part 2 and dad of war.
The story of Hideo Kojima in one sentence.
Trying to move from 1080p to 4K was going to take 3 console generations. And they could barely do 1080p as it was when they wanted to manage 4K, lol. All of the upscaling tech was dove into because the GPU companies thought they were going to need 8K upscalers by 2020. 8K TVs having not truly taken off has something to do with not going that far.
Kojima is the same as George Lucas. He was fine when there were people to rein his ass in, but the more control he got, the more up his own ass his head went.
All creativity needs some restriction to bounce off of. That's just the nature of it, as there's no clarifying limits otherwise.
Has this not been their MO since the Xbox 360? a literal grab bag of games as they scrambled to get a handful of games that you can put up against much older franchises. Nin had Mario. Sony had Final Fantasy. Xbox had Halo but it wasn't clear that would be their flagship going forward so they also had ..... Literally had to check Wikipedia.
Madden that's it the only other series I'm seeing that Xbox could call their own at the time unless you want to count friggin Blinx the time sweeper which somehow got 2 games 1 more then a bunch of others.
The Xbox 360 was the COD console. It was where you played COD in North America. That's really what mattered, which is also why it was where you played Madden at the time. Losing that was the worst part of the Xbox One.
I think it's entirely reasonable to have the entire dev team for Dustborn locked up and have both the studio's computers, and all their personal computers and phones checked by law enforcement, and release whoever isn't guilty. We'd do it if we lived in a decent society.
While I don't disagree, because those virtual signaling types are always the most heinous, and I've seen others have the exact same reaction, I think it was intended for something else. In English, a recently born child is a "newborn". The "new born" is actually a reference to the Christian theological concept of rebirth. So, I think it's intended to be sacrilegious to Christians but comes across as "wait, are they pedos?" to everyone. But that's the level of competence we're dealing with.
Pretty sure Peter Molyneux was sealed away in the dark realm after making fable 3 where he transmogrified into David Cage. before briefly returning for fable fortune trying to chase that hearthstone money.
i miss Deus ex.
