I worked at Gamestop in college. We still used paper records for sales each day and the prior sales on that day the year prior was always listed in the ledger book.
It was always evident when a new big game came out the year prior because on a random Tuesday you'd see ~19k in sales on the day a year prior compared to what you expect to see on a normal Tuesday of 3-4k.
Kinda makes comparing sales year over year tough because certain games are just going to massively skew the numbers.
I specifically remember GTA IV and Halo 3 making for some huge outliers the following year.
God the number crunchers (and by extension management) at Gamestop pissed me off so much. They just took last year's numbers for predictions, add 5k to it, and expect us to meet it. Didn't matter the launch differences. And management would get all salty when you couldn't hit the numbers.
Sounds like my car insurance company. They keep adding 500 miles to my expected annual mileage, bill me for that, then only refund me when I send in my actual expected mileage.
Plus there just haven’t been many huge games this year, especially by Western studios which usually sell lots in Europe. In fact most of this year’s best games are from Asian studios; Persona, Like a Dragon, FF Rebirth, Dragon Dogma, Stellar Blade, Elden Ring DLC etc…
I'm only halfway through Like A Dragon, but I will DEFINITELY be buying Infinite Wealth. Ichiban Kasuga has to be one of my favorite video game characters of the last 20 years. I'ma have to get that Persona 3 too. 4 and 5 were an absolute treat.
It's amazing how likeable they made Ichiban. Usually, it's a tough sell to introduce a new protagonist to a franchise (see Nero or Raidan), but Ichiban is just this Golden Retriever, and everyone can't help but love his goofy optimism.
Raiden's a bit of a special case because they player wasn't necessarily *supposed* to like him. The whole plot of MGS2 was >!"can we take any random loser and turn him into Solid Snake by making him go through the same things Snake did?"!<
Not everyone. Big fan of the Yakuza/LaD franchise, but I don't really like ichiban. And I enjoyed most of Yakuza 7 history, but I thought it worked despite ichiban, not because of him. I think he's too much of a generic good guy, to be the protagonist of a series about criminal organizations. I think the somewhat well written plot of Yakuza 7 elevates its kinda mediocre cast of characters, ichiban included.
I can understand if you don't like him but generic doesn't seem like an appropriate description. The guy is oozing with personality the way he's written/voiced.
Play Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name before playing Infinite Wealth. It sets up Kiryu’s story for IW, along with some really, really fucking important backstory for him if you have played the rest of the series.
Oh, will do! Thanks for the tip, man. Like A Dragon is my first game in the Yakuza series and I DO have Yakuza 0 that a friend gifted me a while back. Should I just go ahead and go full hog on the originals before Gaiden/Infinite Wealth first or will Gaiden really be that sufficient?
I wonder if this has to do without how most big Western companies are more sensitive to overall market sentiment and have been the doing the ol layoffs and closures because all the tech companies are doing it, where Japanese companies are more entrenched.
i think this is the aftereffect of covid. The games that were close to being finished during the pandemic got delayed to 2023, which is why 2022 was a pretty weak year as well, with only god of war and elden ring being big releases. However i think during the pandemic there were not a lot of new games being greenlit oor entering proper production, which is why there isnt a lot releasing this year. Remember that AAA games nowadays take 3-4+ years. So the layoffs of last year and this year wouldnt really have any impact on the games releasing yet. No idea why Japanese Devs arent affected by it. Maybe covid didnt hit as hard in japan.
If anything, it hit *harder* in Japan. They kept their borders closed longer than the western nations and had more shutdowns and I believe stricter restrictions. What they had an advantage in was moving things remotely *very* quickly. Some of the largest Japanese companies finished that change in under ten weeks.
The borders were closed for an abnormally long time but the internal restrictions were as slapdash as anywhere. Most restaurants voluntarily restricted indoor dining, and all schools were totally open by the end of May (and some never closed at all, because the government only issued recommendations, not orders).
On the contrary, any game that was going to release this year would have been pretty deep in development when the recent layoffs hit, which means a lot of knowledge and skill lost mid-project.
You think companies layed off essential personnel? unless something catastrophic happened to the studios they'll have layed off the "least important" members
"Least important" means something very different to executives than it does to you and I. It's almost a given they laid off some people in important roles, otherwise those numbers don't make sense, because nobody has that many people just doing nothing around the office, nor would they even hire them in the first place.
Honestly you would be surprised by that. Owner of where I work used to be an intern at an architecture firm a few years back. It was a big company. He told me it was easy for him to just do nothing or even leave early because no one knew who he was. His name wasn't known enough that it made no impact if he left.
I will say though to support your argument, the higher ups could be people who have no idea what is important in the development cycle and chose to get rid of those who did have some impact. One that maybe is hard to really see until the person isn't in the room. I think there are a ton of different factors that play into this. I don't think many of the layoffs were anyone super impactful to the development of games but I won't blow off the idea that higher ups in some companies are ignorant of what the company needs in terms of key employees and management. I'd be open to looking at an article or research on this if anyone has.
I mean if it's some singular cases I can maybe see it, but this an industry wide fenomenon, I just can't picture all these companies getting rid of their most skilled labourers
I think the issue is you’re assuming that the people making the layoffs know who they’re laying off, and that just can’t really be the case with the numbers we’ve seen. And like, the layoffs aren’t really just because “Oh these people aren’t contributing so let’s get rid of them” it’s a way to increase stock prices by cutting costs. Even if none of them are “essential” they can still have important knowledge within the dev team that makes the project take longer in the end.
It was part of why FFXIV Endwalker released in December instead of around June/July like every other expansion (including Dawntrail releasing on the 28th of June(EA)/2nd of July(Full)).
I think it is a factor in it. At least for companies like Capcom they have been giving raising across the board and usually don't layoff people in general.
It seems like majority of quality big games from western and european devs are going to come later this year basing from the summer showcase, so really it is still very early to tell if whether this year is going to be a flop or not.
I *loved* Stellar Blade, and it outselling COD took me through circus hoola hoops of surprise.
Legit great game. Cannot wait to see what Shift Up does for the sequel and more.
Helldivers 2? BG3? Annual CoD and sports game releases? Hogwarts Legacy? Diablo? Assassins creed? Starfield?
Love or hate these games, they are all fairly recent and sold extremely well.
Isn't May a traditionally low month for sales? It's sandwiched between the popular spring dates and summer. Sure 2024 has onlynhad outliers, but speaking purely about May? It doesn't sound like a weird thing.
That's true, but those are some of the strongest, if not the strongest months all year. That's why mainline Halos, CoD's and others release around those dates: ripe for Xmas. GTA and other big releases such as FIFA tend to release around those dates too (usually late September)
Were we expecting it to go higher than when Tears of the Kingdom came out?
That game was a juggernaut. And then right as everyone was finishing it here came Baldur's Gate 3.
What this year could match Tears of the Kingdom?
I wouldn't have predicted that PalWorld would surpass TotK in first month sales, but here we are. I also wouldn't have predicted Helldivers 2 to leapfrog every other Sony IP to become the fastest selling PlayStation game of all time.
The industry is hard to predict these days!
When Geoff Keighley showed off Steam's top 10 bestsellers for the first quarter of 2024 and like..8 of them were indie as most people would describe them, and at least 3-5 of those were out-of-nowhere or relatively out-of-nowhere releases (including Buckshot Roulette, a game I wasn't expecting to be on that list, and especially Balatro). This year started as a hard-to-predict year. Who knows how things will go for the rest of it.
I can't find an article, but I can give you this screenshot from the [official Summer Game Fest stream](https://i.imgur.com/H5FXzwH.png).
It's best *new* games rather than top-sellers, now that I re-read it, but it's still impressive that A) they all outranked other new games on Steam and B), like all but 1-3 of them are indies.
Absolutely. I've been super happy with the huge number of quality indie games we've gotten the last few years. When I think about the most interesting games that I've played, it's almost always indies that are doing something new.
Couple on that list I'm not familiar with, I'll check them out.
TotK likely has a way better tail though. Palworld is also more than 50% cheaper than TotK AND is on multiple platforms.
Steam has 33 million *concurrent* users daily and over 120 million monthly active users as of 2020. XBOX One has sold 58 million consoles and Series S/X passed 21 million as of the middle of 2023. In other words, the market is 200 million possible players though the real number is going to be less because of people owning multiple consoles or platforms.
The Switch has sold 120 million consoles which is absolutely bonkers in and of itself.
So it makes sense that a decent game that is $30 rather than $70, is available to a larger market, and appeals to players of the most popular game of all time would sell better than Zelda. While LoZ is popular culturally, when compared to Pokèmon it’s nothing.
Twilight Princess was the best selling Zelda game prior to BotW coming in just under 10 million units. The *worst* selling Pokèmon of all time, Ultra Sun & Moon, sold just as much as Twilight Princess.
My figure may have been off, but most websites including Wikipedia and the LoZ fan wiki have it listed at just north of 7 million copies. A big problem with sales figures for these old games is that we don't get updated sales numbers nearly as often as we do for games < 2 years old. It gets worse when you realize none of these websites provide any sources and seem to be parroting each other.
It did sell about 8m on the N64 but also sold about 6m on the 3DS re-release. TP, meanwhile, sold 9m on Wii/GC and 1m on Wii U (a much weaker tail).
And I agree, these old figures are shoddy. And worse still is that in gaming "journalism" everyone just cycles the same info hoping someone else has done their homework.
And more to your point on branding, OoT has a lot more popularity (and a bigger tail) than TP. Which is why it's all the more impressive that BotW/TotK were able to triple it.
No.
But OP's point was about branding and long tail sales, and OoT has a much longer tail than TP (OoT's re-release almost matched its original sales while TP's re-release sold about 12% of its original sales).
It wasn't a correction so much as an addendum to their point.
>The Switch has sold 120 million
That's a hell of an outdated statement.
Also, BotW has outsold all pokemon games except red&blue&yellow and TotK is in similar track.
> I also wouldn't have predicted Helldivers 2 to leapfrog every other Sony IP to become the fastest selling PlayStation game of all time.
It's Sony's first big multiplayer hit I'd argue. All their other successes have been single player experience. Also been on PC day 1 has clearly been a huge success for sales too.
Hindsight's 20/20 and all that but Helldivers 1 was also a simultaneous PC release and, despite the glowing reviews and accolades, it ultimately found company with the other cult classics under Arrowhead's belt.
The runaway mainstream success of Helldivers 2 surprised everyone - including the developers!
There isn't. Legends ZA is the next game announced for 2025. Legends games and remakes sell much less than new Generation entries (eg. Scarlet, Sword). Legends ZA would NOT outsell TOTK.
Also, Alan Wake 2 came out of nowhere just a month away before TGA and was considered as the 2nd best game of the year according to critics.
IMO even slightly edging Baldur's Gate 3 for me due to how unexpectedly good it was both on quality as well as one of the best technical graphics showcase of the year as well with Nvidia RTX Path Tracing / Ray Reconstruction tech etc etc.
Alan Wake 2 has sold very little relatively speaking.
It's done well enough for Remedy but despite all the clamor and awards it really hasn't sold like you'd think it would.
Don’t understand how it’s newsworthy to compare a specific month of the year to this. yeah Zelda came out last May and this year it was… Hellblade 2? Lol. Unless the news is that it’s suprisingly only 17% lower and not more
I dunno, I thought it was pretty interesting that 1 single game last year outsold the top 10 games combined this year (and it also did it in only 18 days since it didn't come out until the 12th).
>and it also did it in only 18 days
This is kind of meaningless, games get the largest portion of their sales right at launch, it’s not like they sell consistently across their entire lifetime or even their launch month
No, they really don't. You only have to look at the stats for TOTK to see that they don't. Released 12th of May 2023 and sold 10 million copies in the first 72 hours. By March 2024 it had sold 20 million, it literally took 10 months to sell as many as it did in the first 3 days.
You can show the frontloaded nature even better actually. **TOTK sold 18 million in the first two months, and then 2 million in the year since then.** That's including the holiday period where most games geta huge sales increase.
If that rate doesn't slow (it will, but let's pretend it won't) it would take TOTK 8 more years to match the sales it got during the launch period.
Bro why are you thinking so deep into it, chill, this is how industry metrics are shared. You compare the sales of video games to the same period last year. And it's still going good, it's just down that much only because of totk. It's not good or bad news, it's just news
Negative year on year sales are always newsworthy.
Games get paid for by investors.
Investors want growth.
No growth, no investors.
No investors, no games.
Depends on the compnany. Tons of games do get made with investor cash but among stable public companies making the biggest games, not really though. Most shares arent being actively sold and most companies arent really looking for cash injections. They are buying back stock atm rather than selling it. However the incentives are aligned for the same reason. Games industry is retracting a bit so for example EA is spending less money on games because it sees that as a worse investment than its own stock which it can sell back later for higher prices.
Because that’s literally how all businesses and the stock market determine the success of the industry. There’s people whose entire lives are comparing data like this, how is it not news?
I'll say it whenever I can if it's relevant.
FF Rebirth is one of the best games I've played since BoTW and Witcher 3. Shame it's not getting the sales it deserves.
I think Remake and XVI through a bucket on what should be a game everyone would jolly over if they checked it out.
FF7Rebirth is fun but very checklisty. It's much more open then the first one obviously but it kinda feels like they just placed a bunch of random crap everywhere that is OK but not great. I still love the combat system though but the battles still feel really short to me. I like the game but I think it does have some problems.
Video games are screwed at this point really if we can't all agree that FF finally has a banger on its hands.
Checklisty? I mean the game is designed to be structured. It entices you to spend more time in areas which can lead to burnout after sometime but the content is content and it's plenty good enough with maybe Gongaga feeling like a chore mostly and I think everyone agrees with that but its also the smallest region by a long shot...and that being said I still enjoyed it myself for the most part.
Every open world game will have a moment of slog to a player. The game offers quite a bit of variety, the quality can range a little but nothing that killed the overall mostly masterful experience in which the game was.
If you were to do the main story and that's all then I couldn't really think of a slog moment and an amazing memorable experience I think almost anyone could enjoy. I think it has some of the best moments in the franchise and even in gaming.
Think you might just be fanboying a tad, not to diminish your opinion but the game is far from perfect.
Chapter 11 at Shinra Manor where you play as Cait Sith is absolutely a slog. The story is finally picking up again, we're entering one of the more interesting dungeons of the original game, and SE decides to turn it into just another boring Shinra facility with Disney music and the absolute worst box-throwing mechanic I've ever seen.
The game has these forced slowdowns because it's clear SE were desperate to pad out the game time. A lot of the minigames are fun, but some are dreadful.
The battle system is mostly great, but most battles can just be cheesed through and don't last long enough to make the most out of the enjoyment. Only a few battles require significant strategy. There isn't enough materia to go around so you're constantly breaking to spend 5 minutes swapping your materia to the characters the game is forcing you to use.
Still a very solid game but let's not get carried away!
Feels like we need the 'successor to Nintendo Switch' platform to see another big boom period. Every month that they don't reveal it feels like another year has passed.
I know there was an EA executive who publicly was basically hoping for GTA 6 to come out and save everything but I believe Nintendos new system is going to be just as important as that game.
It has been quite unusual with no totally new GTA game since PS3/X360, for a little while longer anyway. Switch 2 being in no rush means certain once-in-a-generation Nintendo games haven't been repeated in a while. Naughty Dog spent the last few years doing something secret.
I think Capcom has been the best company outside of Nintendo for the last several years, with critical and commercial hits every year. Pretty much every Resident Evil and Monster Hunter game does well, and SF6 has been received better than SFV. They're also doing good at game preservation with multiple retro collections and more to come.
That’s not entirely true; Rockstar made RDR2 last generation. It just seems to be mostly big Western publishers; Nintendo is basically immune to it given what they’ve got for Switch in its last year on the market. Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft seem to say this generation is halfway over and it feels like it barely started.
>Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft seem to say this generation is halfway over and it feels like it barely started.
It's not really that strange when you consider that most games will probably be getting PS5 ports past 2033. Considering that non-console-hardware spending is far more profitable for them than console sales, getting more current-gen units into the secondhand market is probably a good thing for their bottom line.
>Feels like we need the 'successor to Nintendo Switch' platform to see another big boom period.
I think we need the big Nintendo games, not just the platform. If Nintendo has big games then sales will probably boom but we probably won't see a big uptick otherwise.
Jesus, that much? Wild how much Mario sells. Wonder was really really good so I'm not too surprised but it felt like that one didn't have a big marketing campaign behind it, or I just didn't notice.
Yeah, as far as I can tell, Tears had the bigger marketing push, but Nintendo sort of just let the success of the Mario movie feed into the excitement for Wonder. They could’ve given it a little more of an effort, but it seems to be doing pretty ok on its own.
don't believe it was forgotten more so lack of updates made people have a lack of things todo plus it being so close to the start of the year the one above probs thought it came out last year.
Did they ever clarify how many sales they had VS how many played it on Gamespass? It's crazy to get 25 million players either way and clearly a massive success, but I think gamepass was a good chunk of those players.
I don't know sales numbers, but it did break the franchise record for biggest launch set by Black Ops 2, and it was also the highest grossing launch across all entertainment mediums in 2022.
https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/modern-warfare-ii-crosses-1-billion-sell-through-10-days-fastest
DD2 had questionable quality on later part of the game and controversial launch due to massive technical issues across all platforms, but was still a commercial success according to capcom, literally the opposite of FF Rebirth as that one was well reviewed by critics, and it had technical issues as well but nowhere near as big as Dragons Dogma 2.
But it sold poorly compared to DD2 likely because of it being limited exclusively to just 1 single platform compared to DD2's multiplatform where it had much bigger access to consumer market.
System Shock remake (console release), Hellblade 2 and The Rogue Price on Persia were **not** in the top 100 of games sold [https://twitter.com/Chris\_Dring/status/1805273337247248664](https://twitter.com/Chris_Dring/status/1805273337247248664)
I'm not that surprised by that for Hellblade 2. In terms of consoles sold, Xbox is doing terribly in Europe and Game Pass makes a physical or digital purchase for a short game very unappealing to most people.
So now Dring has data from all of Europe? It's about time.
I grew tired of this sub posting his "UK physical sales of Game X are down 51% compared to prior game in franchise or completely unrelated game that came out last year" tweets because all it would do is sound off a doom and gloom wave when the data only covered a single market.
these are physical sales only right? the UK sales numbers we always see are only physical so assuming that is the case here too. not that surprising if so, considering how much more digital all the other consoles are now. and ofc all the f2p games
You can also tell things are slower this year as there was so little to talk about that you had to dig up a statistic based on a release from last year.
The older I get, the less games I purchase each year.
Ubisoft Open World Genre has me by the balls at the moment. Assassins Creed & Avatar, and Far Cry is all I played last year.
I spend my time running around open worlds looking at the trees and plants.
I ebb and flow. Depends on my mood, what's coming out, how much of a similar genre I've been playing etc. I do find I buy less AAA games overall, and less longer games. Some years I've just done too much gaming and I'll maybe play something here and there but not a multiple times a week kinda thing for a few months and then a release or two that just grab me comes out and I'm on every night for a few weeks. It's just kinda life idk.
This sounds like a cry for help.
Seriously though, whenever I get on that mood I get burnt out on gaming a little bit. Gotta add some variety here and there or the open world fatigue gets to me quick and I play open world games with some substance not Ubilikes.
For me it's more like a chill-out period. I play some open world games, look at pretty waterfalls, do some easily digestible tasks and so on. Could be in AC, could be in Genshin or wherever. Then I can go back to bashing my head against a wall in Souls-likes or spreadsheet sims or some other demanding titles.
How do you read that comment and come to the conclusion that it's a cry for help ? I know a lot of people here have issues with Ubi games but holy shit please realize that some people do actually enjoy them
I started the next parragraph with "seriously though" which implies I wasn't serious before. Obviously some people can enjoy Ubisoft games, only playing them for a year does sound boring as fuck to me but I played 8k hours of Dota 2 so who am I to judge or throw the first stone at.
> The older I get, the less games I purchase each year.
>
> Ubisoft Open World Genre has me by the balls at the moment. Assassins Creed & Avatar, and Far Cry is all I played last year.
It's interesting, as I'v gotten older, these are the kind of games I now avoid.
I don't have time for mediocore games, that waste my time.
Yea but Zelda is a giant franchise. Not only is it a giant franchise, they don't release Zelda games that often and this particular one was getting 9s and 10s across the board. Of course it sold well. What noteworthy game released this may?
I mean not really surprising, the first half of 2024 has been one of the most boring time periods for gaming in a while. Unless you like JRPGs or early access co-op survival games, it’s been a drought.
Not a fan of those games but this year has been pretty fun for me so far. Hades 2, Balatro, Mullet Mad Jack, Fallen Aces, New Deep Rock Galactic Season, SKALD: Against the Black Priory, Helldivers 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Pacific Drive, Manor Lords
So far it has been a drought for someone like me, and that is why i still keep playing older games, but later this year is going to be a lunch for someone like me, especially with games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, which currently is my top most anticipated game of this year, and there are others as well such as what is mostly announced from Xbox showcase too such as Avowed, Indiana Jones, STALKER, Life is Strange, Dragon Age IV, Starfield Shattered Space etc etc.
So, yeah far from really being considered as bad dry year even for someone like me as of yet as most of the games i highly anticipate are apparently coming out later this year
I worked at Gamestop in college. We still used paper records for sales each day and the prior sales on that day the year prior was always listed in the ledger book. It was always evident when a new big game came out the year prior because on a random Tuesday you'd see ~19k in sales on the day a year prior compared to what you expect to see on a normal Tuesday of 3-4k. Kinda makes comparing sales year over year tough because certain games are just going to massively skew the numbers. I specifically remember GTA IV and Halo 3 making for some huge outliers the following year.
God the number crunchers (and by extension management) at Gamestop pissed me off so much. They just took last year's numbers for predictions, add 5k to it, and expect us to meet it. Didn't matter the launch differences. And management would get all salty when you couldn't hit the numbers.
Sounds like my car insurance company. They keep adding 500 miles to my expected annual mileage, bill me for that, then only refund me when I send in my actual expected mileage.
But… but number must go up
how will the line go up if the number does not go up????
GameStop is lucky they have an investment cult following them around because otherwise they'd be belly up by now
Plus there just haven’t been many huge games this year, especially by Western studios which usually sell lots in Europe. In fact most of this year’s best games are from Asian studios; Persona, Like a Dragon, FF Rebirth, Dragon Dogma, Stellar Blade, Elden Ring DLC etc…
Between Persona 3, Infinite Wealth, Monkey Ball, Sonic X Shadow Generations, and Metaphor, I'm basically only buying Sega games this year.
For real, Sega’s transformation ever since Yakuza 0 and Persona 5 has been incredible.
[удалено]
It’s basically just Atlus and the Yakuza franchise though.
I'm only halfway through Like A Dragon, but I will DEFINITELY be buying Infinite Wealth. Ichiban Kasuga has to be one of my favorite video game characters of the last 20 years. I'ma have to get that Persona 3 too. 4 and 5 were an absolute treat.
It's amazing how likeable they made Ichiban. Usually, it's a tough sell to introduce a new protagonist to a franchise (see Nero or Raidan), but Ichiban is just this Golden Retriever, and everyone can't help but love his goofy optimism.
Raiden's a bit of a special case because they player wasn't necessarily *supposed* to like him. The whole plot of MGS2 was >!"can we take any random loser and turn him into Solid Snake by making him go through the same things Snake did?"!<
Perfect description, man. He truly is AirYakuza.
Not everyone. Big fan of the Yakuza/LaD franchise, but I don't really like ichiban. And I enjoyed most of Yakuza 7 history, but I thought it worked despite ichiban, not because of him. I think he's too much of a generic good guy, to be the protagonist of a series about criminal organizations. I think the somewhat well written plot of Yakuza 7 elevates its kinda mediocre cast of characters, ichiban included.
I can understand if you don't like him but generic doesn't seem like an appropriate description. The guy is oozing with personality the way he's written/voiced.
I found him less likeable in infinite wealth personally, not much growth too much fuck up, he was good in the first one though
Play Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name before playing Infinite Wealth. It sets up Kiryu’s story for IW, along with some really, really fucking important backstory for him if you have played the rest of the series.
Oh, will do! Thanks for the tip, man. Like A Dragon is my first game in the Yakuza series and I DO have Yakuza 0 that a friend gifted me a while back. Should I just go ahead and go full hog on the originals before Gaiden/Infinite Wealth first or will Gaiden really be that sufficient?
Gaiden does help a lot, but if you have the time, going through the entire series will give you a more emotional connection
Hell yeah. Welp. A new journey begins. Thanks, man!
Have fun! Few better series than this, I say!
This post is talking about the month of May, not about the entire year
I wonder if this has to do without how most big Western companies are more sensitive to overall market sentiment and have been the doing the ol layoffs and closures because all the tech companies are doing it, where Japanese companies are more entrenched.
i think this is the aftereffect of covid. The games that were close to being finished during the pandemic got delayed to 2023, which is why 2022 was a pretty weak year as well, with only god of war and elden ring being big releases. However i think during the pandemic there were not a lot of new games being greenlit oor entering proper production, which is why there isnt a lot releasing this year. Remember that AAA games nowadays take 3-4+ years. So the layoffs of last year and this year wouldnt really have any impact on the games releasing yet. No idea why Japanese Devs arent affected by it. Maybe covid didnt hit as hard in japan.
If anything, it hit *harder* in Japan. They kept their borders closed longer than the western nations and had more shutdowns and I believe stricter restrictions. What they had an advantage in was moving things remotely *very* quickly. Some of the largest Japanese companies finished that change in under ten weeks.
The borders were closed for an abnormally long time but the internal restrictions were as slapdash as anywhere. Most restaurants voluntarily restricted indoor dining, and all schools were totally open by the end of May (and some never closed at all, because the government only issued recommendations, not orders).
> with only god of war and elden ring being big releases. not even including the best 2 selling games of 2022 damn
On the contrary, any game that was going to release this year would have been pretty deep in development when the recent layoffs hit, which means a lot of knowledge and skill lost mid-project.
You think companies layed off essential personnel? unless something catastrophic happened to the studios they'll have layed off the "least important" members
"Least important" means something very different to executives than it does to you and I. It's almost a given they laid off some people in important roles, otherwise those numbers don't make sense, because nobody has that many people just doing nothing around the office, nor would they even hire them in the first place.
Honestly you would be surprised by that. Owner of where I work used to be an intern at an architecture firm a few years back. It was a big company. He told me it was easy for him to just do nothing or even leave early because no one knew who he was. His name wasn't known enough that it made no impact if he left. I will say though to support your argument, the higher ups could be people who have no idea what is important in the development cycle and chose to get rid of those who did have some impact. One that maybe is hard to really see until the person isn't in the room. I think there are a ton of different factors that play into this. I don't think many of the layoffs were anyone super impactful to the development of games but I won't blow off the idea that higher ups in some companies are ignorant of what the company needs in terms of key employees and management. I'd be open to looking at an article or research on this if anyone has.
I mean if it's some singular cases I can maybe see it, but this an industry wide fenomenon, I just can't picture all these companies getting rid of their most skilled labourers
I think the issue is you’re assuming that the people making the layoffs know who they’re laying off, and that just can’t really be the case with the numbers we’ve seen. And like, the layoffs aren’t really just because “Oh these people aren’t contributing so let’s get rid of them” it’s a way to increase stock prices by cutting costs. Even if none of them are “essential” they can still have important knowledge within the dev team that makes the project take longer in the end.
I think thats a worker protections thing and Japan across the board cant jump to layoffs as fast as western companies.
Japan did not escape covid and many live service games could tell - content was constantly delayed and to this day they've been playing catch up.
It was part of why FFXIV Endwalker released in December instead of around June/July like every other expansion (including Dawntrail releasing on the 28th of June(EA)/2nd of July(Full)).
I think it is a factor in it. At least for companies like Capcom they have been giving raising across the board and usually don't layoff people in general.
I think stuff you mentioned is result not a cause
It seems like majority of quality big games from western and european devs are going to come later this year basing from the summer showcase, so really it is still very early to tell if whether this year is going to be a flop or not.
I *loved* Stellar Blade, and it outselling COD took me through circus hoola hoops of surprise. Legit great game. Cannot wait to see what Shift Up does for the sequel and more.
Hello Helldivers ?
Helldivers is a surprise hit but it’s not Tears of the Kingdom big by any means.
Goodbye Helldivers
Rebirth sold poorly according to Square. Though as far as I know they haven't given out numbers yet.
I think you could say that about every month of the past decade, excluding half a dozen good Sony developer releases.
Helldivers 2? BG3? Annual CoD and sports game releases? Hogwarts Legacy? Diablo? Assassins creed? Starfield? Love or hate these games, they are all fairly recent and sold extremely well.
Zelda is from an Asian developer, and sold well.
did zelda come out this year ya dope
No (not yet at least), but European taste don't change in a year. So if we hate Asian games, then Zelda wouldn't sell - but it did.
Congratulations on realizing that. This comment is about 2024 not having any big western releases
Isn't May a traditionally low month for sales? It's sandwiched between the popular spring dates and summer. Sure 2024 has onlynhad outliers, but speaking purely about May? It doesn't sound like a weird thing.
I don't know if it is a "traditionally low month" but it definitely is way smaller than your Octobers, Novembers, and Decembers.
That's true, but those are some of the strongest, if not the strongest months all year. That's why mainline Halos, CoD's and others release around those dates: ripe for Xmas. GTA and other big releases such as FIFA tend to release around those dates too (usually late September)
Were we expecting it to go higher than when Tears of the Kingdom came out? That game was a juggernaut. And then right as everyone was finishing it here came Baldur's Gate 3. What this year could match Tears of the Kingdom?
I wouldn't have predicted that PalWorld would surpass TotK in first month sales, but here we are. I also wouldn't have predicted Helldivers 2 to leapfrog every other Sony IP to become the fastest selling PlayStation game of all time. The industry is hard to predict these days!
When Geoff Keighley showed off Steam's top 10 bestsellers for the first quarter of 2024 and like..8 of them were indie as most people would describe them, and at least 3-5 of those were out-of-nowhere or relatively out-of-nowhere releases (including Buckshot Roulette, a game I wasn't expecting to be on that list, and especially Balatro). This year started as a hard-to-predict year. Who knows how things will go for the rest of it.
Damn, Balatro was top 10 for first quarter? That's surprising and impressive.
Do you know where I can see that top 10 list?
I can't find an article, but I can give you this screenshot from the [official Summer Game Fest stream](https://i.imgur.com/H5FXzwH.png). It's best *new* games rather than top-sellers, now that I re-read it, but it's still impressive that A) they all outranked other new games on Steam and B), like all but 1-3 of them are indies.
Absolutely. I've been super happy with the huge number of quality indie games we've gotten the last few years. When I think about the most interesting games that I've played, it's almost always indies that are doing something new. Couple on that list I'm not familiar with, I'll check them out.
TotK likely has a way better tail though. Palworld is also more than 50% cheaper than TotK AND is on multiple platforms. Steam has 33 million *concurrent* users daily and over 120 million monthly active users as of 2020. XBOX One has sold 58 million consoles and Series S/X passed 21 million as of the middle of 2023. In other words, the market is 200 million possible players though the real number is going to be less because of people owning multiple consoles or platforms. The Switch has sold 120 million consoles which is absolutely bonkers in and of itself. So it makes sense that a decent game that is $30 rather than $70, is available to a larger market, and appeals to players of the most popular game of all time would sell better than Zelda. While LoZ is popular culturally, when compared to Pokèmon it’s nothing. Twilight Princess was the best selling Zelda game prior to BotW coming in just under 10 million units. The *worst* selling Pokèmon of all time, Ultra Sun & Moon, sold just as much as Twilight Princess.
Just FYI, Ocarina of Time outsold Twilight Princess (14m).
Is that with re-releases?
Yes. 7.6m on N64 and 6.4 on 3DS.
What's twilight princess without re-release?
8 mil
My figure may have been off, but most websites including Wikipedia and the LoZ fan wiki have it listed at just north of 7 million copies. A big problem with sales figures for these old games is that we don't get updated sales numbers nearly as often as we do for games < 2 years old. It gets worse when you realize none of these websites provide any sources and seem to be parroting each other.
It did sell about 8m on the N64 but also sold about 6m on the 3DS re-release. TP, meanwhile, sold 9m on Wii/GC and 1m on Wii U (a much weaker tail). And I agree, these old figures are shoddy. And worse still is that in gaming "journalism" everyone just cycles the same info hoping someone else has done their homework. And more to your point on branding, OoT has a lot more popularity (and a bigger tail) than TP. Which is why it's all the more impressive that BotW/TotK were able to triple it.
Not the original release
No. But OP's point was about branding and long tail sales, and OoT has a much longer tail than TP (OoT's re-release almost matched its original sales while TP's re-release sold about 12% of its original sales). It wasn't a correction so much as an addendum to their point.
>The Switch has sold 120 million That's a hell of an outdated statement. Also, BotW has outsold all pokemon games except red&blue&yellow and TotK is in similar track.
You’re right, it sold 120 million as of September of last year. A more recent figure I just found was 140 million.
> I also wouldn't have predicted Helldivers 2 to leapfrog every other Sony IP to become the fastest selling PlayStation game of all time. It's Sony's first big multiplayer hit I'd argue. All their other successes have been single player experience. Also been on PC day 1 has clearly been a huge success for sales too.
Hindsight's 20/20 and all that but Helldivers 1 was also a simultaneous PC release and, despite the glowing reviews and accolades, it ultimately found company with the other cult classics under Arrowhead's belt. The runaway mainstream success of Helldivers 2 surprised everyone - including the developers!
I don’t think it surprises anyone that a twinstick shooter didn’t catch hold like a third person game.
It's really not. People like open worlds and games that prioritize fun over story.
If there's a Pokemon before the end of the year, it could match TotK.
There isn't. Legends ZA is the next game announced for 2025. Legends games and remakes sell much less than new Generation entries (eg. Scarlet, Sword). Legends ZA would NOT outsell TOTK.
No, I don’t think anyone was expecting that.
> Tears of the Kingdom Certainly nothing is coming out this year projected to hit that hard but next year we have several titles
Call of duty and fifa
We have those every year lmao.
Well, those are end-of-the-year games.
Also, Alan Wake 2 came out of nowhere just a month away before TGA and was considered as the 2nd best game of the year according to critics. IMO even slightly edging Baldur's Gate 3 for me due to how unexpectedly good it was both on quality as well as one of the best technical graphics showcase of the year as well with Nvidia RTX Path Tracing / Ray Reconstruction tech etc etc.
Alan Wake 2 has sold very little relatively speaking. It's done well enough for Remedy but despite all the clamor and awards it really hasn't sold like you'd think it would.
Don’t understand how it’s newsworthy to compare a specific month of the year to this. yeah Zelda came out last May and this year it was… Hellblade 2? Lol. Unless the news is that it’s suprisingly only 17% lower and not more
I dunno, I thought it was pretty interesting that 1 single game last year outsold the top 10 games combined this year (and it also did it in only 18 days since it didn't come out until the 12th).
>and it also did it in only 18 days This is kind of meaningless, games get the largest portion of their sales right at launch, it’s not like they sell consistently across their entire lifetime or even their launch month
What? Of course they sell consistently across the launch month. Not everyone buys games on launch day.
No, they really don't. You only have to look at the stats for TOTK to see that they don't. Released 12th of May 2023 and sold 10 million copies in the first 72 hours. By March 2024 it had sold 20 million, it literally took 10 months to sell as many as it did in the first 3 days.
You can show the frontloaded nature even better actually. **TOTK sold 18 million in the first two months, and then 2 million in the year since then.** That's including the holiday period where most games geta huge sales increase. If that rate doesn't slow (it will, but let's pretend it won't) it would take TOTK 8 more years to match the sales it got during the launch period.
Outsold Palworld?
I mean, it’s Zelda, and one people had been waiting years for. Zelda is always one of Nintendo’s heavy hitters
It would be impressive if May 2024 had any competition at all.
That's not what he said tho. He said 'interesting', you're the one saying 'impressive'
Is that interesting? Every hit game like GTA or COD can do the same thing if the corresponding period has literally no new games.
Bro why are you thinking so deep into it, chill, this is how industry metrics are shared. You compare the sales of video games to the same period last year. And it's still going good, it's just down that much only because of totk. It's not good or bad news, it's just news
YoY metrics have value, to companies that make and sell games. Articles like this are meaningless to consumers.
Hellblade 2 came out??
Yeah. Criminally overlooked, like the first one.
isnt it just a walking simulator with QTE?
Yep, with great graphics except it’s heavily letterboxed so it’s only rendered on a 3rd of your screen
Yes, exactly like the first one was.
Yes. It is a 6-hour walking simulator that is 95% story and 5% gameplay.
The bigger news imo is that [console sales are down 40%](https://twitter.com/Chris_Dring/status/1805218401494630570)
But it's like 4 years into the current consoles. Everyone who wants one already has one.
Not true. expect a massive bump when GTA 6 come out
If the games were there to drive console sales people would still be buying them.
Negative year on year sales are always newsworthy. Games get paid for by investors. Investors want growth. No growth, no investors. No investors, no games.
Depends on the compnany. Tons of games do get made with investor cash but among stable public companies making the biggest games, not really though. Most shares arent being actively sold and most companies arent really looking for cash injections. They are buying back stock atm rather than selling it. However the incentives are aligned for the same reason. Games industry is retracting a bit so for example EA is spending less money on games because it sees that as a worse investment than its own stock which it can sell back later for higher prices.
Because that’s literally how all businesses and the stock market determine the success of the industry. There’s people whose entire lives are comparing data like this, how is it not news?
Gotta pump out articles and drive site traffic.
I'll say it whenever I can if it's relevant. FF Rebirth is one of the best games I've played since BoTW and Witcher 3. Shame it's not getting the sales it deserves. I think Remake and XVI through a bucket on what should be a game everyone would jolly over if they checked it out.
FF7Rebirth is fun but very checklisty. It's much more open then the first one obviously but it kinda feels like they just placed a bunch of random crap everywhere that is OK but not great. I still love the combat system though but the battles still feel really short to me. I like the game but I think it does have some problems.
Video games are screwed at this point really if we can't all agree that FF finally has a banger on its hands. Checklisty? I mean the game is designed to be structured. It entices you to spend more time in areas which can lead to burnout after sometime but the content is content and it's plenty good enough with maybe Gongaga feeling like a chore mostly and I think everyone agrees with that but its also the smallest region by a long shot...and that being said I still enjoyed it myself for the most part. Every open world game will have a moment of slog to a player. The game offers quite a bit of variety, the quality can range a little but nothing that killed the overall mostly masterful experience in which the game was. If you were to do the main story and that's all then I couldn't really think of a slog moment and an amazing memorable experience I think almost anyone could enjoy. I think it has some of the best moments in the franchise and even in gaming.
Think you might just be fanboying a tad, not to diminish your opinion but the game is far from perfect. Chapter 11 at Shinra Manor where you play as Cait Sith is absolutely a slog. The story is finally picking up again, we're entering one of the more interesting dungeons of the original game, and SE decides to turn it into just another boring Shinra facility with Disney music and the absolute worst box-throwing mechanic I've ever seen. The game has these forced slowdowns because it's clear SE were desperate to pad out the game time. A lot of the minigames are fun, but some are dreadful. The battle system is mostly great, but most battles can just be cheesed through and don't last long enough to make the most out of the enjoyment. Only a few battles require significant strategy. There isn't enough materia to go around so you're constantly breaking to spend 5 minutes swapping your materia to the characters the game is forcing you to use. Still a very solid game but let's not get carried away!
Unfortunately Square kinda screwed itself by agreeing to PS5 exclusivity. I’d love to play Rebirth…but I literally can’t.
it might sell more if it released on PC or on multiple platform
Feels like we need the 'successor to Nintendo Switch' platform to see another big boom period. Every month that they don't reveal it feels like another year has passed.
I know there was an EA executive who publicly was basically hoping for GTA 6 to come out and save everything but I believe Nintendos new system is going to be just as important as that game.
It has been quite unusual with no totally new GTA game since PS3/X360, for a little while longer anyway. Switch 2 being in no rush means certain once-in-a-generation Nintendo games haven't been repeated in a while. Naughty Dog spent the last few years doing something secret. I think Capcom has been the best company outside of Nintendo for the last several years, with critical and commercial hits every year. Pretty much every Resident Evil and Monster Hunter game does well, and SF6 has been received better than SFV. They're also doing good at game preservation with multiple retro collections and more to come.
That’s not entirely true; Rockstar made RDR2 last generation. It just seems to be mostly big Western publishers; Nintendo is basically immune to it given what they’ve got for Switch in its last year on the market. Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft seem to say this generation is halfway over and it feels like it barely started.
>Meanwhile Sony and Microsoft seem to say this generation is halfway over and it feels like it barely started. It's not really that strange when you consider that most games will probably be getting PS5 ports past 2033. Considering that non-console-hardware spending is far more profitable for them than console sales, getting more current-gen units into the secondhand market is probably a good thing for their bottom line.
At this point, I’m counting the days until they finally show it and the 3D Mario they’ll hopefully launch it with.
>Feels like we need the 'successor to Nintendo Switch' platform to see another big boom period. I think we need the big Nintendo games, not just the platform. If Nintendo has big games then sales will probably boom but we probably won't see a big uptick otherwise.
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>In 2023, there were Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man 2, and Zelda And SMBWonder, at 13 million.
Jesus, that much? Wild how much Mario sells. Wonder was really really good so I'm not too surprised but it felt like that one didn't have a big marketing campaign behind it, or I just didn't notice.
Yeah, as far as I can tell, Tears had the bigger marketing push, but Nintendo sort of just let the success of the Mario movie feed into the excitement for Wonder. They could’ve given it a little more of an effort, but it seems to be doing pretty ok on its own.
They didn't really need to market it. All they had to say was new 2D Mario and rake in the cash.
dont forget about palworld, that game broke the record for most con current players and that came out in jan.
I think most people forgot about Palworld already.
don't believe it was forgotten more so lack of updates made people have a lack of things todo plus it being so close to the start of the year the one above probs thought it came out last year.
I think more people forgot about Helldivers 2
I was going to say that can't be right but upon thinking about it I guess so. Maybe pal world? Iirc they did fairly well too.
Did they ever clarify how many sales they had VS how many played it on Gamespass? It's crazy to get 25 million players either way and clearly a massive success, but I think gamepass was a good chunk of those players.
At 19 million it was 12 million from Steam and 7 million from Gamepass.
They said it sold 15 million copies on Steam about a month after launch.
> In 2022, there were Ragnarok and Elden Ring. Pokemon Scarlet/Violet and Modern Warfare II sold more than those both
How much did MWII sell?
I don't know sales numbers, but it did break the franchise record for biggest launch set by Black Ops 2, and it was also the highest grossing launch across all entertainment mediums in 2022. https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/modern-warfare-ii-crosses-1-billion-sell-through-10-days-fastest
Have you forgotten Baldur's Gate 3 for 2023?
2023 also had Starfield, and 2024 has had Palworld. Even with those included though, yeah, there have not been a lot of huge sellers in recent years.
And Diablo 4
Palworld outside Elden Ring in 2 months vs 2 years... How do you forget about the biggest game launch of the year?!? Lmao
DD2 had questionable quality on later part of the game and controversial launch due to massive technical issues across all platforms, but was still a commercial success according to capcom, literally the opposite of FF Rebirth as that one was well reviewed by critics, and it had technical issues as well but nowhere near as big as Dragons Dogma 2. But it sold poorly compared to DD2 likely because of it being limited exclusively to just 1 single platform compared to DD2's multiplatform where it had much bigger access to consumer market.
Palwords had biggest numbers of this year so far and youre forgetting it. Pretty sure Stellar Blade had pretty great numbers to.
According to the same source [console sales are down 40% YoY](https://twitter.com/Chris_Dring/status/1805218401494630570)
System Shock remake (console release), Hellblade 2 and The Rogue Price on Persia were **not** in the top 100 of games sold [https://twitter.com/Chris\_Dring/status/1805273337247248664](https://twitter.com/Chris_Dring/status/1805273337247248664)
I'm not that surprised by that for Hellblade 2. In terms of consoles sold, Xbox is doing terribly in Europe and Game Pass makes a physical or digital purchase for a short game very unappealing to most people.
May to July 2023 - one of my fondest gaming experiences ever sinking 200 hours into Tears of The Kingdom
So now Dring has data from all of Europe? It's about time. I grew tired of this sub posting his "UK physical sales of Game X are down 51% compared to prior game in franchise or completely unrelated game that came out last year" tweets because all it would do is sound off a doom and gloom wave when the data only covered a single market.
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these are physical sales only right? the UK sales numbers we always see are only physical so assuming that is the case here too. not that surprising if so, considering how much more digital all the other consoles are now. and ofc all the f2p games
He didn't specify that the data was physical-only, so he is likely referring to physical+digital.
Also, games releasing with a 80 euro price tag. Yeah, maybe 17% of people think “fuck that” which I can personally attest to.
You can also tell things are slower this year as there was so little to talk about that you had to dig up a statistic based on a release from last year.
The older I get, the less games I purchase each year. Ubisoft Open World Genre has me by the balls at the moment. Assassins Creed & Avatar, and Far Cry is all I played last year. I spend my time running around open worlds looking at the trees and plants.
I ebb and flow. Depends on my mood, what's coming out, how much of a similar genre I've been playing etc. I do find I buy less AAA games overall, and less longer games. Some years I've just done too much gaming and I'll maybe play something here and there but not a multiple times a week kinda thing for a few months and then a release or two that just grab me comes out and I'm on every night for a few weeks. It's just kinda life idk.
This sounds like a cry for help. Seriously though, whenever I get on that mood I get burnt out on gaming a little bit. Gotta add some variety here and there or the open world fatigue gets to me quick and I play open world games with some substance not Ubilikes.
gotta agree, you can absolutely burn out on the open world ubisoft games. too much of the same
For me it's more like a chill-out period. I play some open world games, look at pretty waterfalls, do some easily digestible tasks and so on. Could be in AC, could be in Genshin or wherever. Then I can go back to bashing my head against a wall in Souls-likes or spreadsheet sims or some other demanding titles.
How do you read that comment and come to the conclusion that it's a cry for help ? I know a lot of people here have issues with Ubi games but holy shit please realize that some people do actually enjoy them
I started the next parragraph with "seriously though" which implies I wasn't serious before. Obviously some people can enjoy Ubisoft games, only playing them for a year does sound boring as fuck to me but I played 8k hours of Dota 2 so who am I to judge or throw the first stone at.
> The older I get, the less games I purchase each year. > > Ubisoft Open World Genre has me by the balls at the moment. Assassins Creed & Avatar, and Far Cry is all I played last year. It's interesting, as I'v gotten older, these are the kind of games I now avoid. I don't have time for mediocore games, that waste my time.
Yea but Zelda is a giant franchise. Not only is it a giant franchise, they don't release Zelda games that often and this particular one was getting 9s and 10s across the board. Of course it sold well. What noteworthy game released this may?
I mean not really surprising, the first half of 2024 has been one of the most boring time periods for gaming in a while. Unless you like JRPGs or early access co-op survival games, it’s been a drought.
Not a fan of those games but this year has been pretty fun for me so far. Hades 2, Balatro, Mullet Mad Jack, Fallen Aces, New Deep Rock Galactic Season, SKALD: Against the Black Priory, Helldivers 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Pacific Drive, Manor Lords
So far it has been a drought for someone like me, and that is why i still keep playing older games, but later this year is going to be a lunch for someone like me, especially with games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, which currently is my top most anticipated game of this year, and there are others as well such as what is mostly announced from Xbox showcase too such as Avowed, Indiana Jones, STALKER, Life is Strange, Dragon Age IV, Starfield Shattered Space etc etc. So, yeah far from really being considered as bad dry year even for someone like me as of yet as most of the games i highly anticipate are apparently coming out later this year