Was Dragon Age: Inquisition a commercial failure?

[Infinitron]

This thread is now about debunking or proving the notion that Dragon Age: Inquisition is selling poorly.

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=dragon age: inquisition

2.2 million sales on VGChartz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Inquisition#Sales

Sales
Dragon Age: Inquisition debuted at No. 5 in UK in its first launch week. According to retail monitor Chart-Track, it had sold almost the exact amount of launch week copies as 2011's Dragon Age II.[60] This does not take into account direct digital download sales however,[61] which have been noted to be a "significant percentage of sales" by BioWare[62] and thus the true number of sales is higher.

http://forum.bioware.com/topic/5337...p-10-best-selling-of-nov/page-3#entry18059466

Hi guys - obviously it's a drag not to see DAI on that top 10 list for November. I can't really give any figures of course...However, from what I know about the sales numbers (a) DAI is doing great and well ahead of it's predecessors, and a significant percentage of sales of DAI are digital and not tracked by NPD. If anything, I'm more worried about the weird signals this chart sends to the market about DAI, as opposed to the reality of our unit sales

 

[Xor]

Hm. I wouldn't be surprised if it was doing well. On the other hand, if it was, why don't they just release the figures?

 

[a Goat]

Armchair economist analysis incoming.
Retail copies give you around half of their price. So imagine that this is 2,2M*$30 = $66M, digital sales are probably somewhere around 1M(significant=/=major) but they're technically getting 100% of it(Origin). So they have total of ~126M after Christmas, for a console game, it's already 70-90% of copies sold. So the best possible forecast is around $180M-$200M. Ah and DLC's of course(another ~$25M but also some costs). So imagine best case scenario somewhare around $250M.

However if that looks impressive, now it's time for Skyrim(more or less the same budget of $100000000). I won't count anything but physical distribution. 18M*$30 + 2M*$25(PC) = $590M. According to Todd:

“Skyrim did better than we’ve ever done on PC by a large, large number."

~http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/18/apparently-we-wont-hear-about-fallout-4-for-a-while/

So you can imagine that real figures, including DLC's and digital sales may be well over $1B.

Is DA:I financial catastrophe? It depends on whether EA executives wanted to see Skyrim's numbers or not, but it's highly unlikely that they'll shut Bioware down because of it as even though it could deliver less than expected, it still sold well enough to make another game with similar budget and there's still some money left.

That being said vgchartz are highly inaccurate so it could have been $500M total or $70M just as well.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

It's all very well making hundreds of millions of dollars, but if you're also panned by the Codex then where's the job satisfaction?

 

[bloodlover]

DA:O however was hyped to the sky and I assume more people were anticipating it (especially after the claims the devs made before the launch, like: "Spiritual Successor to Baldur's gate"). There wasn't anything to compare it with back then and there was no previous game in the franchise.

Will every RPG from now on compare sales to Skyrim?

 

[Necroscope]

FUCK. They survived.

Of course they did, cockroaches will survive anything.

 

[Viata]

To be fair, had DA:I sold less than DA2 or 1, EA would close Bioware. I mean, unlike the others DA, this one was released to 4 consoles and PC.

 

[imweasel]

Look on the bright side. I hear Inquisition is doing horribly.

I dunno if it is doing horribly, but I seriously doubt that the game is meeting internal expectations because it is failing to chart in the US and many European countries according to chart data posted on Neogaf. They are already posting "RIP Dragon Age" and stuff.

BTW Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 had no problem charting.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I dunno if it is doing horribly, but I seriously doubt that the game is meeting internal expectations because it is failing to chart in the US and many European countries according to chart data posted on Neogaf. They are already posting "RIP Dragon Age" and stuff.

BTW Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 had no problem charting.

Depends on whether the EA suits are as stupid at factoring in the delayed-response brand factor in franchise sales (where fans decide to buy the current game in the series on the basis of whether they liked the past few games, not the quality of the current one as they can't evaluate that until after purchase). I think that's unlikely, as it's their core proficiency and the thing that can be observed with longitudinal sales charts, and doesn't require any understanding of videogames (brand loyalty is something you'd expect a good marketing exec to be a genuine expert in). Any dip in sales from pre-purchase through to end of the 1st month is most likely the fault of DA2 (just as DA:O's reception carried DA2 despite the latter being poorly received by customers).

 

[Clockwork Knight]

We're barely into January and we already have a strong candidate for most inane thread splitting of the year.

 

[cvv]

To be fair, had DA:I sold less than DA2 or 1, EA would close Bioware. I mean, unlike the others DA, this one was released to 4 consoles and PC.

Afaik DAO was outselling DA2 the second week into the release of DA2 which is an enormous embarrassment but not only EA didn't close Bioware they didn't even kicked the retard duo Laidlaw/Gaider out.

I don't think EA would ever outright close Bioware tho. At worst they would say "enough with your silly niche experiments" and turn them into mass-producing FIFA assembly line.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Why would they close BioWare? SW:TOR makes the same money a year than DA:I will in its lifetime and isn't Mass Effect is their bigger IP anyway?

 

[Hobo Elf]

Why would they close BioWare? SW:TOR makes the same money a year than DA:I will in its lifetime and isn't Mass Effect is their bigger IP anyway?

Why would they close Origin? Why would they close Westwood? They don't need the BioWare to keep making the games since they already own the IPs. They'll keep them around as long as they are profitable and when that stops they will axe the studio and contract a bunch of kids to do the same work BioWare did for a quarter of the salary.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Why would they close Origin? Why would they close Westwood? They don't need the BioWare to keep making the games since they already own the IPs. They'll keep them around as long as they are profitable and when that stops they will axe the studio and contract a bunch of kids to do the same work BioWare did for a quarter of the salary.

The same reason they keep Maxis? This way fans will blame EA for all the failures and give the "studio" (Maxis/BioWare) the benefit of doubt that they could have done better if it wasn't for the EA suits or will do better next time, even though it's pretty clear, that the reason for failure is to find in the studios, not EA.

They closed Origin because it was basically useless as a brand in 2004. And they closed Westwood at a time, when RTS fell from grace for an indefinite period of time. Most original talent was gone already anyway - though apparently Maxis and BioWare seem to be at least somewhat useful as fake shells.

 

[Perkel]

Why would they close BioWare? SW:TOR makes the same money a year than DA:I will in its lifetime and isn't Mass Effect is their bigger IP anyway?

Why would they close Ensemble if all their games made profit and some of them were actual classics.
Also as of Armchair economist above.

Consider this:

EA is paying from 20 to 100mln for both game development and marketing campaign. Game sold in actual retailers don't get 50% cut. You are looking at 20-50% shop cut + manufacturing + distribution + storage.

Now you paid 100mln $$$ for game and you get only like 300mln instead of 500mln. What if next game will ba a failture commercially wise ? Then those 100mln would go to drain.

This is how EA and other big wigs operate. The don't give a fuck about 1mln or even 3 mln sales anymore. They need those 5mln + range games to be profitable to support their bureaucratic offices.

And this is why Enseble got shut down. Because they couldn't make RTS or game that would sell in 5mln+ range. And this is why Bioware could be soon put onto table for butchery.

TORtanic making money and being profitable is poor excuse as they will need to actually earn few years to get some actual profits and if you read above it isn't enough profitable for them.

Also shareholders actually earn money so EA profits are shareholder profits.

 

[Durante]

It will probably end up selling pretty well, but considering its budget, development time and gameplay style I think the idea was to be Bioware's Skyrim. And that obviously didn't happen, not by a long shot.

 

[Infinitron]

Why would they close BioWare? SW:TOR makes the same money a year than DA:I will in its lifetime and isn't Mass Effect is their bigger IP anyway?

It should be noted that Bioware isn't a single developer at this point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWare#Structure

What people ITT are really talking about is the Edmonton studio.

 

[Kz3r0]

Any Bioware game can guarantee two millions and half of copies sold judging from past sales, the problem is that they can't guarantee five millions and more, all depends on what EA expect from them.

 

[Sykar]

There are too many retards in this world for such a turd to not be successful.

 

[Azrael the cat]

This thread is now about debunking or proving the notion that Dragon Age: Inquisition is selling poorly.

And he'll split the thread to make that so!:D

 

[Jaesun]

Wow, magical made up VGCharz numbers. Amazing.

 

[Coboney]

So, I don't really know - how reliable is VGChartz? I haven't really looked at them and all their methodology page says mostly is "proprietary" on it and vague statements

 

[cfisher2833]

That'd be funny if they just end up turning it into an full on MMO. May as well.

 

[Jaesun]

So, I don't really know - how reliable is VGChartz? I haven't really looked at them and all their methodology page says mostly is "proprietary" on it and vague statements

The numbers they come up with are numbers that they pull from their ass. It's complete made up bullshit.

NPD however uses ACTUAL sales numbers.

 

[Akratus]

For some reason Bioware has a very good reputation.

I wouldn't expect the gamers like angry joe to like games like origins either, but they do.