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Was Dragon Age: Inquisition a commercial failure?

imweasel

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It's really not hard to understand. [Skyrim is] a big open world where you can go wherever you want whenever you want. Show it to someone [a retard] who isn't a jaded cunt and they're going to love it, flaws be damned.
Oh, they love it.

8578649.jpg
 
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Just a thought, but: What exactly prevents a publisher from lying about sales? We all know that from a macro point of view that more people are interested in something the more they think other people are interested in something.

I'm not actually imaging that it's happening since you could be sure that, done consistently, it would leak out eventually or someone would notice inconsistencies, just curious what you guys thought of the possibility.
 

Whiran

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Just a thought, but: What exactly prevents a publisher from lying about sales? We all know that from a macro point of view that more people are interested in something the more they think other people are interested in something.

I'm not actually imaging that it's happening since you could be sure that, done consistently, it would leak out eventually or someone would notice inconsistencies, just curious what you guys thought of the possibility.
EA is a publicly traded company.

If they lie about their sales they will have to explain things in unpleasant ways to certain authority bodies.

However, that doesn't mean that they cannot present the numbers in a manner that is most beneficial to themselves.
 
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Just a thought, but: What exactly prevents a publisher from lying about sales? We all know that from a macro point of view that more people are interested in something the more they think other people are interested in something.

I'm not actually imaging that it's happening since you could be sure that, done consistently, it would leak out eventually or someone would notice inconsistencies, just curious what you guys thought of the possibility.

If they are privately owned, they can do that without any consequences, aside from pissing off the several remaining ethical gaming journalists left.

EA is a publicly traded company IIRC, so they can't do that without incurring legal lawsuits, especially from shareholders.

EDIT: Ninja-ed
 
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Does the publicly-released information to shareholders go all the way to specific sales numbers? Does anyone have an example?

Lying on the whole isn't illegal at all, so long as they aren't specifically lying to the shareholders in a document that they are required to tell the truth in. Heck, don't even have to technically lie, simply say something like "projections are that we will sell 9 million copies by the end of 1st Qtr 2015", because ultimately you can project anything.
 
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Does the publicly-released information to shareholders go all the way to specific sales numbers? Does anyone have an example?

Lying on the whole isn't illegal at all, so long as they aren't specifically lying to the shareholders in a document that they are required to tell the truth in.

If I remember when working for Intel, all finance undergoings in the corporation are audited on an annual basic by a third party company.
I am not sure if the information gathered during that will be given to both shareholders and the taxation department. Didn't ask.
Due to that, I don't think you cannot outright lie on anything related to finance.

EDITED: FYI, Intel too is a publicly traded corporation.
 
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Lying about how many of something you sold isn't really related to finance, which would be lying about your income or expenses. There's also the fact that with online sales that go direct through EA's service that EA has no real trail to follow, the number can only come from them or from a bunch of bankers getting together to see how many different transactions happened.

Again, not suspecting EA or any other publisher of actually doing this. Just speculating for speculations sake.
 

Hepler's Vagina

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If I remember when working for Intel, all finance undergoings in the corporation are audited on an annual basic by a third party company.
I am not sure if the information gathered during that will be given to both shareholders and the taxation department. Didn't ask.

The third party audit is just to give a one page opinion that the company's accounts are "more or less fairly presented ... we think". Nothing of that goes outside, not even to shareholders (who can simultaneously be directors of a competitor for example).
The auditors can request almost anything unless it has absolutely nothing to do with finance, eg they would need a pretty good reason to ask for source code. So the auditors can certainly ask "how well did turd X sell" and get a full breakdown straight away. So they are the only ones apart from the board and EA/Bioware internal finance who can close this topic.
 

Mustawd

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Auditor here. Long time lurker, but seeing as this is kind of down my alley I thought to register and respond.



Does the publicly-released information to shareholders go all the way to specific sales numbers? Does anyone have an example?


Yes. However, it depends on the company and industry. Typically sales info is published in a 10Q (quarterly statement) or 10k (annual statement). However, typically a day or so before it is officially published, the C suite executives will have something called an Earnings Release call.

It's basically a preview of what the reports will say before they come out in Management's own words (i.e. plain English combined with accounting speak). In addition, they also respond to questions from analysts, which can be quite insightful if you know what you're listening for.

Anyhow, sales figures can be by service line, main product, division, company level, etc. just depends.

Lying on the whole isn't illegal at all, so long as they aren't specifically lying to the shareholders in a document that they are required to tell the truth in. Heck, don't even have to technically lie, simply say something like "projections are that we will sell 9 million copies by the end of 1st Qtr 2015", because ultimately you can project anything.


Not all info in the 10Q/quarterly earnings release is audited for accuracy. For quarters we only have to make sure it's consistent and based on something and not absolutely made up.

So if EA reports XYZ dollars as sales for Q1 2015 it's based on something. In addition, those numbers may also be tested as part of the end of year audit, so it behooves the company to not just make shit up. Otherwise, people like me start asking questions, and no one likes that. Especially not around things like revenue numbers (literally the biggest fraud risk in most companies).
 

tuluse

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Does the publicly-released information to shareholders go all the way to specific sales numbers? Does anyone have an example?

Lying on the whole isn't illegal at all, so long as they aren't specifically lying to the shareholders in a document that they are required to tell the truth in. Heck, don't even have to technically lie, simply say something like "projections are that we will sell 9 million copies by the end of 1st Qtr 2015", because ultimately you can project anything.
They don't release sales numbers to shareholders.

They definitely cannot lie about how much revenue something brought in (though there are creative accounting practices). Lying about units shipped would be more of a grey area. Another thing is that publishers really like to use the units shipped metric instead of units sold. Ship 10 copies to a store today and sell 8 of them in 6 months of 75% off, but hey you "shipped" 10 units!
 

Mustawd

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They don't release sales numbers to shareholders.


I'd agree that sharing specific sales numbers to shareholders is probably rare, as individual games mean fuck all when you have a large portfolio of them. So grouping of games is more common.

Plus, sales numbers aren't always the most important metric. Net Sales, which takes into account sales returns, is typically more often sighted as simply revenue. For example:

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-KX1KB/3818576875x0x792615/A7764C7F-0DF6-4160-890D-5D0F05EB060D/Zynga Q3'14 Earings Slides.pdf


The earnings release from Zynga specifically mentions how much revenue each one of their top games is making (slide 13).

But that's probably because A.) the nature of subscription based games means understanding long term trends is extremely important, and B.) Zynga's staying power has been in doubt for a while. So they're almost forced to provide these numbers to investors or they risk their stock plummeting.


EDIT: Regardless if you're looking at shipped products, downloaded sales, etc, it's a good bet that revenue per game is the most important metric for EA execs at least. After all, if say, there are game breaking bugs and many products are returned (assuming this affects EA, which I'm not sure it would or not), then sales become meaningless in deciding whether or not something is a failure.
 
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Glaurung

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That 500+ DAI megathread wasn't enough? Awaiting 100+ posts in "Was DAI a commercial failure" within the week.
 

Whiran

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They don't release sales numbers to shareholders.

They definitely cannot lie about how much revenue something brought in (though there are creative accounting practices). Lying about units shipped would be more of a grey area. Another thing is that publishers really like to use the units shipped metric instead of units sold. Ship 10 copies to a store today and sell 8 of them in 6 months of 75% off, but hey you "shipped" 10 units!
EA sometimes releases specific sales numbers to investors - it depends on how a product has done.

You can take a look at their past Earnings Releases yourself at:

http://investor.ea.com/

When a game does not do particularly well EA will bundle it into a category but, generally, they try to give rounded numbers for units shipped. Of late EA has been revealing the number of highest concurrent players of a game (likely due to their move towards free-to-play games in the mobile market and they have some advertising deals) instead of units sold. If you really want to know how a release has done you can guess with a strong degree of accuracy based on the numbers on how a platform did quarter to quarter.

Inquisition's initial numbers should be in their next Earnings Release which will come out at the end of this month. If Inquisition did really well I expect EA to follow their past announcement guideline of revealing the number to the closest half million. If Inquisition did not do really well I'd expect EA to either claim that there was an unexpected sale hiccup or to just plain bury Inquisition entirely by not mentioning it beyond the "Dragon's Age: Inquisition" was released as expected and leave it at that.
 
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Mr Fantastic

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We learned from the Amalur debacle that for a AAA game 3 million sales are not considered to be very profitable, though of course this can vary from company to company and publisher to publisher. Bioware is much more experienced than the Amalur crew was, and they had all the funding they needed. Still, the figure of 3M does tell us that sales would likely need to be higher than that for the game to be considered a hit and a sequel to be greenlit.

It's certainly possible digital sales exceeded sales of the physical copy, because most software sales are digital now across the world. Until any other information is released/leaked the best way to figure out if the game was considered succesful is to monitor fan reaction, layoff's hiring at the development studio and whether a sequel is greenlit or not. Quarterly statements released by EA in March and half yearly in June should also tell us something. They won't specifiy sales of any particular product, but by comparing figures with past years we should be able to decipher something.

I am willing to do this as I deal with financials in my day job, as long as someone reminds me come quarter end.
 

Roguey

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We learned from the Amalur debacle that for a AAA game 3 million sales are not considered to be very profitable, though of course this can vary from company to company and publisher to publisher. Bioware is much more experienced than the Amalur crew was, and they had all the funding they needed. Still, the figure of 3M does tell us that sales would likely need to be higher than that for the game to be considered a hit and a sequel to be greenlit.

It's certainly possible digital sales exceeded sales of the physical copy, because most software sales are digital now across the world. Until any other information is released/leaked the best way to figure out if the game was considered succesful is to monitor fan reaction, layoff's hiring at the development studio and whether a sequel is greenlit or not. Quarterly statements released by EA in March and half yearly in June should also tell us something. They won't specifiy sales of any particular product, but by comparing figures with past years we should be able to decipher something.

I am willing to do this as I deal with financials in my day job, as long as someone reminds me come quarter end.

EA only made money from Amalur. BHG/38 Studios died because the cost of making that MMO put them in a hole they could never realistically climb out of.
 

DeepOcean

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I really feel schadenfreude every time I see some bad news for Bioware and isn't even because they gone popamole, they weren't the only RPG developerd that did, but because of their sheer arrogance on their mediocrity and a blindness to their own faults that is impressive but unfortunately I don't think EA will do the death blow yet even if DA:I sells less than 5 millions. ME 4 still can sell something and it isn't that EA has a huge number of profitable popamole franchises.
 

Infinitron

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I really feel schadenfreude every time I see some bad news for Bioware and isn't even because they gone popamole, they weren't the only RPG developerd that did, but because of their sheer arrogance on their mediocrity and a blindness to their own faults that is impressive but unfortunately I don't think EA will do the death blow yet even if DA:I sells less than 5 millions. ME 4 still can sell something and it isn't that EA has a huge number of profitable popamole franchises.

I'm pretty sure nobody will shut down Bioware as a brand anytime soon. But what could happen is that the original Bioware studio, Bioware Edmonton, will get downsized. ME4 is being developed at a different location.
 

Akratus

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EA even slapped BIOWARE on their Command and Conquer studio, right? It's like Bioware's rep is a cure-all for rep amongst mainstream gamers. But then came along DA2 and ME3. Thank god for small blessings.
 
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Space Satan

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Bioware will not be closed. I doubt it will suffer laying offs with all money EA invested into them - it's cheaper to milk their existing franchizes than shut them outright. Warhammer Online proved that you can have a stable income even without any support just from retardd fanbois.
Even with 150 people at two servers fanbois screamed how great game is farings and if you don't like it - "go find another game, we will have our perfect game without you". DA and ME fanbases is much more than than and can provide significant income to keep studio afloat.
With upcoming ME 4 noone will even consider closing Biowhore. Sadly, I bet eveno those, who sweared not to buy any biowhore game again will preorder ME4. just because biowharore fanbase is retarded but useful for milking.
 

tuluse

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EA even slapped BIOWARE on their Command and Conquer studio, right? It's like Bioware's rep is a cure-all for rep amongst mainstream gamers. But then came along DA2 and ME3. Thank god for small blessings.
At one time I think EA had like 5 studios branded Bioware. They've backed down a lot from that now with just the two studios, but I doubt DA3 has done bad enough to limit them in any way.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
At one time I think EA had like 5 studios branded Bioware. They've backed down a lot from that now with just the two studios, but I doubt DA3 has done bad enough to limit them in any way.

Threes studios, actually - Edmonton, Montreal, Austin
 

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