NPD still doesn't have EXACT sales numbers. There is still some fudgework going on where they look at shipping stuff and do some sampling out because unless ever retailer was hooked into a live inventory database that NPD had access too you just can't know. Not only that, but there are some outlets that don't report to NPD. So it further muddies the waters.
The sales stuff is all estimates, both in games and in movies. Most entertainment mediums have the problem of not knowing how much of the product actually gets to consumers, most publishers only have access to how much product they put out.
I don't think Square is putting all their failings on western games. Those just happen to be the biggest named releases they've had recently. Just thinking about the titles I've heard of it's been Hitman, sleeping dogs, ffxiii ii, and tomb raider. I think they expected the western stuff to do better than it did and it is a disappointment to them. Square is fully aware of how jacked up ffxiv. But that's not as important to them right now. Companies with investors run on a stupid quarterly mindset and so they literally only care about what happened most recently. Most recently, Tomb Raider didn't sell as many copies as they expected, even after they spent more money on marketing than they had for any of their previous western made titles. They're bummed. It's a failure. But they're experiencing what happened to PC games about ten years ago. PC games were selling as well as they ever had, the sales weren't dropping at all on PC games, but console games took a leap in sales that the industry didn't really expect. PC games never followed suit so we kept talking about how they were dying, when they were just not keeping up.
We're going to see more and more of this next gen. Certain titles will push sales well beyond what we're used too, and other companies will attempt to match that and end up failing miserably. Except that if they had tried to make a very similar game with slightly less cash and slightly less expectations they'd be fine. If the industry as a whole doesn't look at sales estimates and start talking about how everything is failing in a certain segment just because it's not keeping pace with the few titles that are well above average, then we'll be okay. If they do what they are want to do and judge every game by the outliers then we're going to continue having discussions about how selling millions of copies of a game isn't good enough.
Topic: Sell millions, still a failure? (Read 17853 times)
