Edge also notes that U.K. sales numbers for the week ending July 11 list The Conduit as the highest new entry for the month to date, entering the charts at number 29 overall.
The 12-day U.S. tally eclipses the first-month numbers of Sega's The House of the Dead: Overkill (45,000 copies sold in February) and MadWorld (66,000 copies sold in March), despite the fact that The Conduit released much later in the month than the other two titles.
An interesting lesson in spin here. Looking around the web, it's hard to find this story without a negative spin attached to it. Every place I looked said "72,000 is terrible, hardcore games don't work on Wii". I found that to be very interesting. For example, Edge chose to phrase The Conduit's sales as being "under 72,000", which I thought was a curious choice of words since 72,000 is a completely arbitrary number. 72,000 can be considered a success or a failure depending on what you choose to hold it up against.
When placed against HOTD:O and MW, the other two Sega yardsticks (real yardsticks, not "Here's how we wish hardcore games would sell on the Wii" yardsticks), The Conduit has actually done quite well. Its first-month sales are 60% more than HOTD and 10% more than MadWorld in roughly half the time on store shelves.
Is the glass half-full, or half-empty? It's all in how you choose to spin numbers.
When placed against HOTD:O and MW, the other two Sega yardsticks (real yardsticks, not "Here's how we wish hardcore games would sell on the Wii" yardsticks), The Conduit has actually done quite well.
That's a good sign. I'm not a huge fan of the game, but I do hope it sells enough to warrant a sequel, as the potential for greatness is there.
Unless its a complete bomb, there will be sequel or a spin-off. You don't just a create an engine on only one vision, big business men are smarter than that.
I think this is great news!
I bought the game (as well as MadWorld) purely to support Sega and HVS.
I wouldn't mind trying out Gyrostarr on WiiWare, and I'm certainly interested in The Grinder. Not so much that Gladiators game though.
You don't really know that. How well it is performing, from Sega and High Voltage's perspective, is relative to the development costs. If The Conduit was considerably more expensive to produce than those other games, it could still be a disappointment even with higher raw sales numbers. We don't have enough data to make any good conclusions at this point.
I wonder how Animales De La Muerte would have sold. Pity we'll never know.....
I'm not sure if someone has said this or not, but since it came out in late June doesn't that bode well for the future?
Interesting you should bring up Killzone. If you want to see how tough it is out there for original IPs, look at the PS3. They've relied on original IPs for the first three years of the system's life and it's killed them, regardless of the quality of the games.
Interesting you should bring up Killzone. If you want to see how tough it is out there for original IPs, look at the PS3. They've relied on original IPs for the first three years of the system's life and it's killed them, regardless of the quality of the games.
But then I think the PS3's problem has always been the price of the system itself.
The Conduit had alot of HYPE going for it so I expected alot more sales just with the pre-orders. Or course it did come out in June but if you compare that to Prototype which sold 400K on a system with 1/2 the userbase you'll have to wonder why? The only answer is the genre isn't popular on a WII system.
