Generally speaking, algorithms on these sites don’t serve me a ton of videos with no views from creators with no followers, en masse. With AC shadows, I was suddenly inundated with these videos, on multiple sites, without ever having looked anything up about it, exclusively by streamers that nobody is watching.
This is true, but one thing I noticed with AC Shadows is that there were a LOT of no-name streamers posting reels with fake hype over the game. It was a little egregious and came off as more than a little desperate.
I am an absolute die hard Hitman fan. I’ve played all of them. Replayed the whole series last year. Blood money was a better sandbox by far than the previous games. And it’s still a blast to go back and play just for the nostalgia and the vibes. But the people who insist today that it’s better than the World of Assassination trilogy are smoking crack. Not only that, but in some ways Blood Money was a big downgrade from the previous games. Hitman 3 in its current state today incorporates all the best things about Blood Money, the games that came before it, the game came after it, while cutting out the negatives.
The biggest problem with Blood Money for me was that it trivialized all challenge the game could have had by making disguises perfect and infallible. In the games that came before, having the right disguise only working from a distance, and get this: you actually had to act natural. You could just sprint between two armed guards, brushing both of their shoulders with a huge machine gun out as you passed by. In Blood Money disguises were simply an indicator of which rooms you were allowed to be in, and if you got a good enough disguise you could just be in all of them.
In WoA they fixed this without making you have to walk everywhere via the enforcer system, and better level design with tiered guards. Finding a disguise for the highest level guards let you go anywhere you want, but there would be more enforcers for you to have to avoid. Where’s more niche disguises that would reasonably make sense for nobody to recognize you were much better for moving around unabated.
A good observation. Hence why one of those games can afford to launch during a crowded window despite its lack of quality, and the other, despite their confidence in their work, and the high quality of their work, could not. You’re starting to get it now.
That’s just not how these things work. Launch windows have a documented history of being uniquely impactful to the long term success of games, movies, even products. It would take some serious evidence to the contrary for you to claim otherwise.
Also if an (already established) company’s future is jeopardized by a single game not doing well, I’m sorry but it’s not well managed. Ask me how I know.
That’s not really here nor there. It also isn’t really true.
A good solo game might take a hit to its initial sales but should recover in the long run.
It won’t though. This feel-good theory that if a game is “good” then it’ll just make the same amount of money it always would have otherwise is not supported by any real world evidence. And even the most hypothetically high quality, ethical, game making company is still a company in the end, and companies need to money to pay living wages and keep people employed making new games. And if the games they are putting out are high quality, they probably have competent leadership. And competent leadership isn’t going to gamble the future of their company and livelihoods of their employees on an unproven feel-good fantasy espoused only by people on Reddit and Lemmy who’ve never run a business before.
It’s the exact same thing actually. Their claim was:
Good games will sell regardless of what’s out
But that’s just not true, and game studios of all sizes know that. The risk aversion of these companies exist because of the reality of the situation.
It also has nothing to do with a studios confidence in their game. The quality of a game is light years away from being the sole objective indicator of a games sales. The Outer Wilds is objectively one of the greatest games ever made and has no real peers in what it does. And yet it didn’t make nearly the sales numbers as the latest asset flipped Call of Duty game.
They aren’t crowding into those windows because competition helps their sales, it’s because they expect the biggest shopping period of the year will result in more sales than they lose. And there’s a reason only the biggest titles release in these windows.
Capcom made the decision years ago to release in February/March because they know a November window will drown them.
I don’t know about that one. Games are expensive these days and if your game releases anywhere near the rumored $100 GTA 6, a LOT of people are going to have to choose one or the other, and it’s very unlikely that in most cases they don’t choose GTA6, literally the most anticipated video game of the last decade. Sure you can always buy the smaller game later, but a huge part of the sales of video games is the opening week, when all the hype around it has had time to come to a head, and you’re influenced by the fact that lots of other people are playing it.
Yeah good games will always sell SOME copies. But if you thinking that a game even releasing in the same month as GTA6 won’t have a permanent impact on that games sales, you’re smoking the reefer.
It’s one of those things where it looks good where in like the case of a video game, the GAME’s implementation of it is good AND your Console/PCs implementation is good AND your TV/Monitor’s implementation is good. But like unless you’ve got semi-deep pockets, at least one of those probably isn’t good, and so the whole thing is a wash.