Azrael the cat
Arcane
Befuddled Halfling said:Xor said:
Volly did. DA2 sold over 2m copies per the EA Q4 investor call. They'd lie to game journos, but not to investors, where their accounts are audited by KPMG.
So............
If it's at 2m SOLD at 1 and 3/4 months from release, then DA2 is now officially a reasonable success. So evidently people did NOT want more than 2 stats per class. Or encounters that were designed, rather than spawned. They did not want to change companion armor. They did NOT want crafting. They DID want a reduction in the number of skills and spells. They did not want non combat skills. They DID want a dialog wheel that just gave you the 'cocksucker', 'wiseass', and 'cunt' option of saying exactly the same thing that led to exactly the same recycled corridor. They DID want a cinematic every time they walked 5 steps.
Gaider was therefore right - the shitstorm on the BioBoards was just by a bunch of old school PC elitists afraid of change. An obnoxious, vocal, minority. And maybe the metacritic bomb was a 4 chan raid. Either way, this is exactly the motivation that BIO needs to never even try making core RPGs again. And that means we'll have some real Codex- style fun when DA3 is released.
DA3 should be so retarded, it ought to be almost at ArcaniA levels and even Volly might have a hard time defending its honor. Bring on 2012!
A decent proportion of those sales were pre-orders or first fortnight purchases, meaning that they reflect the consumers' opinion of DA1 rather than DA2 (even more so if most consumers don't closely follow online game analysis). If you were just an average consumer, with no information other than (a) the previous Bioware games, (b) marketing hype and (c) mainstream reviews/previews, you're going to judge it mainly on (a) previous Bioware games, especially DA1. DA2's qualities aren't going to enter into the decision, because they're unknown to most consumers at the time of purchase.
What's more, a company with as well-established a fanbase as Bioware (we might not like them, but to most crpg fans they are godlike) isn't going to lose that fanbase from 1 disappointing game. So even if folks hated DA2, I'd still expect great sales for ME3 and solid sales for DA3.
What it does mean is that IF consumers are dissatisfied, Bioware's sales would not reveal that yet. So they have no reason to change their current hypothesis (that simplification = more profit), and so yes DA3 will probably continue in the same manner as DA2.
As for sales reflecting consumer satisfaction, this isn't soft drinks. With most consumer goods, the customers repurchase the good on a regular basis. A coka-cola fan might buy, say, 100 cans a year. If Coke suddenly changed the production and folks didn't like it, that consumer might stop buying them after 3 cans - hence the dissatisfaction will be IMMEDIATELY reflected in consumer behaviour.
With computer games, each person only buys each game once. Then they wait a couple of years and buy a different game from the same company. If coka-cola makes crap coke, its fans immediately stop their purchasing cycle. Yet if every single fan was to outright cease Bioware purchasing (massively unlikely) that STILL wouldn't show up in sales until 2 years later when the next game comes out. And as I said, folks aren't going to stop buying Bioware games just because they thought one game was below expectations.
Instead, consumer dissatisfaction is only going to flow into diminished sales over a long-term trend. If Bioware was to repeatedly put out games that the market was dissatisfied with, then maybe over their next 3-5 games their sales would drop noticeably. And in the converse of this relationship, it would then be very very difficult to raise those sales again - it would take a similar run of games that surpassed consumer expectations to lift the sales back.
and condensing it into tl;dr:
