Gaming News

Robert ninja

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

For many, these are the reasons to own a console - not God of War or Forza Horizon (the exception, naturally, being Nintendo). The stats are interesting to see the scale of how some of these games have sold for sure, but don’t think they provide much insight into the broader market that we didn’t already now

I see sales, the only thing Sony is interested in, as insightful.... It's probably the most important data in any industry. Data on sales is a business in and of itself.

We now know, and more importantly we know that Sony knows that their most profitable products can be gotten on other platforms. That's significant. It explains a lot of their behaviour and confirms a lot of suspicions.

Jerichoholic wrote: »

Where are the sales numbers in that article?

Reddit post explaining the math:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/a6ssfu/sony_accidentally_disclosed_the_number_of_players/

Website with estimates: http://gamstat.com/

3700 pictures of trophy details from which the data was calculated from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WDDFGXpVSIGQaXt_r_0zsxjy6a1r-1Ls/view

In news

Steam award nominees, if anyone cares.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/2796070940830340422

EA employee fired over inappropriate language. The person who claimed offence over his wording now seeks€ his job.
https://www.breakingnews.ie/business/man-dismissed-from-ea-ireland-for-alleged-inappropriate-remark-reinstated-and-fired-again-high-court-hears-892858.html
Not exactly latest news but articles have been popping up or updating recently about it and it's the first I heard of it.

kunst nugget

I thought it was pretty well known already that the exclusives on PS4 sold nowhere near as much for the console as the big hitters such as Fifa, COD, GTA etc...

ERG89

kunst nugget wrote: »

I thought it was pretty well known already that the exclusives on PS4 sold nowhere near as much for the console as the big hitters such as Fifa, COD, GTA etc...

Anyone surprised by that is an idiot.
What does sell the units they do anywhere?
GTA V was a regular in the charts up until recently, I assume it's fallen since RDR2 launched.
Not sure how accurate the numbers are or surely PS+ games played are way ahead of where they'd normally be. Some thing like Bulletstorm for example sank without a trace on it's PS4 release but I'm sure when given free people gave it a go.

johnny_ultimate

kunst nugget wrote: »

I thought it was pretty well known already that the exclusives on PS4 sold nowhere near as much for the console as the big hitters such as Fifa, COD, GTA etc...

Yep, it’s always been abundantly clear that these multi-platform titles sell staggering amounts of copies across both Sony and Microsoft platforms. Publicly released charts and figures have always shown this is the case.

And once again the leaked data is incomplete: games like Uncharted 4, God of War, Horizon and other big-name and best-selling exclusives are absent. Given the sales figures which have been publicly revealed for those games, their absence on the list severely restricts what it can tell us.

gizmo

Rather than going any further down this rabbit hole can we clarify one thing please, these are not sales numbers nor are they a particularly accurate reflection of sales. Caveats of how the data was collected and missing entries aside, the figures also don't factor in trade-ins, rentals and multiple accounts used with the same purchase, regardless of the manner in which it's done.

How much does that affect the figures? Well it depends on how sensitive the individual game is to those factors but as for how badly it can throw things off, we can look no further than FIFA 18 for solid data. Despite the chart having 32.5m players for the PS4 alone, back in September, shortly before the release of FIFA 19, EA announced they had sold 24m copies of the game across all platforms in the year since launch.

Robert ninja

You'll find that companies are very happy to announce sales when they're going well but quickly go silent and even try to gag any information of bad sales especially when it comes to flagship products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpKmJCLSIQk

Check the stock values of most major AAA publishers currently.
In news

Final character announced for Huniepop 2. https://nichegamer.com/2018/12/19/final-new-character-revealed-for-huniepop-2-tomboy-ashley/
The real news here for me is that there's even a sequel.

Jojo Battle Royale?!
https://youtu.be/74_QFBzorhE
I can't even.

johnny_ultimate

Robert ninja wrote: »

You'll find that companies are very happy to announce sales when they're going well but quickly go silent and even try to gag any information of bad sales especially when it comes to flagship products.

With all due respect Robert, you’re talking absolute nonsense if you’re suggesting PlayStation exclusives aren’t selling well.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/spider-man-ps4-breaks-sony-game-sales-records/1100-6461923/
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-09-10-spider-man-nets-amazing-sales

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/02/28/horizon-zero-dawn-celebrates-its-first-birthday-surpasses-7-6-million-sales/

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2018/05/03/god-of-war-is-the-fastest-selling-ps4-exclusive-ever-with-more-than-3-1-million-units-sold-in-three-days/

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-12-11-uncharted-series-sales-passes-41-million

Sonics2k

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

With all due respect Robert, you’re talking absolute nonsense if you’re suggesting PlayStation exclusives aren’t selling well.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/spider-man-ps4-breaks-sony-game-sales-records/1100-6461923/
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-09-10-spider-man-nets-amazing-sales

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/02/28/horizon-zero-dawn-celebrates-its-first-birthday-surpasses-7-6-million-sales/

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2018/05/03/god-of-war-is-the-fastest-selling-ps4-exclusive-ever-with-more-than-3-1-million-units-sold-in-three-days/

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-12-11-uncharted-series-sales-passes-41-million

To be fair to Robert, I don't think he said that. What he said was that Sony will simply not talk about flagships that don't do well, or busy stories that do talk about it.

It's extremely safe to say that Sony's exclusives are doing very well, its one of the key reasons they've dominated this generation of consoles.

edit:
An example would be a company like Blizzard Entertainment. For years and years they very happily announced the subscriber number for World of Warcraft, boasting at it's success. Weirdly though, when subscriber numbers started to drop heavily, losing around 50% of their playerbase in 5 years.

"Note that this is the last quarter that we plan to provide subscriber numbers," the company said. "There are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance."

Current estimates put the subscriber base at around 3 million active accounts.

johnny_ultimate

Sonics2k wrote: »

To be fair to Robert, I don't think he said that. What he said was that Sony will simply not talk about flagships that don't do well, or busy stories that do talk about it.

It's extremely safe to say that Sony's exclusives are doing very well, its one of the key reasons they've dominated this generation of consoles.

Well if that’s not what he’s saying then absolutely fair enough! But since this topic has come up he has suggested that the fact multi-platform titles have done so well is some sort of notable negative for Sony when all indications are that many of their exclusives - which, it’s important to stress are often more ‘core’ than a lot of the multi-platform bestsellers - have done well. That already niche prospects like The Last Guardian aren’t big blockbusters is no surprise

Exclusives are still a big deal - look at the Forza series on xbox as well, or the pretty insane numbers Nintendo does with exclusives. I just don’t think there’s any surprise that data shows a whole lot of people are playing FIFA and GTAV on their PS4s And Sony *have* boasted about the sales of pretty much all their big-budget flagships recently (except maybe The Order - nobody talks about The Order :pac:)

gizmo

Robert ninja wrote: »

You'll find that companies are very happy to announce sales when they're going well but quickly go silent and even try to gag any information of bad sales especially when it comes to flagship products.

Check the stock values of most major AAA publishers currently.

Quite true but still, irrelevant to the point at hand.

If you want another example, one could look at GTA V. As part of their investor call back in November, Take Two announced that they had sold over 100m copies of GTA V. The above stats have the PS4 version alone at 55.9m copies which would mean the remaining 44.1m would have to be split between not only XBox One and PC but also the original release on the 360 and PS3. Now, the next-gen releases came in November 2014 and the PC release two months later but sales up until August 2014 had been 34m, again according to the investor call from that period. Finally, on the Steam-side of the PC release, SteamSpy has the game ownership sitting somewhere between 10m and 20m copies.

As you can see, the numbers presented simply don't add up when taken as sales data.

As for the stock prices of certain publishers, they're being similarly misrepresented across many parts of the internet. Tech stocks of some of the biggest companies have been hit hard across the board with Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google all seeing drops along the same lines as EA and Activision.

Hell, to bring it back to GTA V above, even Take Two who are still printing money from GTA Online and are riding the wave from RDR2 have seen their stock take a hammering.

Retr0gamer

Sony don't really release exclusives to sell big numbers, it's just nice for them when they do. I find a lot of time Sony exclusives plug gaps in the software line up to make the system more appealing to a wider audience. And it's worked for them. Xbox seems to just target the traditional gamer audience while sony has always targeted the living room.

There's a far better benefit to Sony with exlcusives than sales of those titles. They sell more consoles.

But then to suggest Spiderman or GoW are selling poorly is ridiculous.

J. Marston

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

With all due respect Robert, you’re talking absolute nonsense if you’re suggesting PlayStation exclusives aren’t selling well.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/spider-man-ps4-breaks-sony-game-sales-records/1100-6461923/
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-09-10-spider-man-nets-amazing-sales

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/02/28/horizon-zero-dawn-celebrates-its-first-birthday-surpasses-7-6-million-sales/

https://blog.eu.playstation.com/2018/05/03/god-of-war-is-the-fastest-selling-ps4-exclusive-ever-with-more-than-3-1-million-units-sold-in-three-days/

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-12-11-uncharted-series-sales-passes-41-million

Very happy Horizon did those kind of numbers. Wouldn't be surprised if it hits 10 million soon although that will be because it seems to be on sale for the last 6 months.

Gunmonkey

J. Marston wrote: »

Very happy Horizon did those kind of numbers. Wouldn't be surprised if it hits 10 million soon although that will be because it seems to be on sale for the last 6 months.

Been on sale for longer than that, I grabbed it for €30 with DLC in the sale last January.

Robert ninja

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

With all due respect Robert, you’re talking absolute nonsense if you’re suggesting PlayStation exclusives aren’t selling well.

That's not my opinion. I just think the sales info explains their behaviour (cross platform malarkey being an example).

While the topic is on finances I'll link the current stocks this year from companies previously mentioned.


Sony


Take Two


EA


It was nothing but up up up until recently. Most have bled 1/2 of the year's gains. It's interesting and pretty smart that consumers are now using corporations' stock market trading tag on social media when they have concerns about business practices or products. I doubt that is responsible for these trends since it's a very recent thing but who knows for 2019. Consumers are hoping investors see their complaints to companies so that things might change like with "SNE" being tagged when criticising Sony's heavy censoring.

In news

Honestly not much except some Xbox Two rumours
https://www.denofgeek.com/uk/games/62418/xbox-2-codenames-rumoured-to-be-anaconda-and-lockhart

J. Marston

Anaconda? Don't want none unless you got good games, hun. I regret nothing.

kunst nugget

The stock market in America is on track to have its worst December since the Great Depression. Those graphs are probably similar to almost every company on the NASDAQ.

Grumpypants

Robert ninja wrote: »

That's not my opinion. I just think the sales info explains their behaviour (cross platform malarkey being an example).

While the topic is on finances I'll link the current stocks this year from companies previously mentioned.


Sony


Take Two


EA


It was nothing but up up up until recently. Most have bled 1/2 of the year's gains. It's interesting and pretty smart that consumers are now using corporations' stock market trading tag on social media when they have concerns about business practices or products. I doubt that is responsible for these trends since it's a very recent thing but who knows for 2019. Consumers are hoping investors see their complaints to companies so that things might change like with "SNE" being tagged when criticising Sony's heavy censoring.

In news

Honestly not much except some Xbox Two rumours
https://www.denofgeek.com/uk/games/62418/xbox-2-codenames-rumoured-to-be-anaconda-and-lockhart

Tech stock, in general, went on a crazy bull run over the last few years that was long overdue a correction. EA went from $11 to $146. There is very little to read into those figures today other than the market overran its price and came back in line.

But the "consumer advocate Youtubers" will of course but it down to SJW's or some sillyness.

AlmightyCushion

Grumpypants wrote: »

Tech stock, in general, went on a crazy bull run over the last few years that was long overdue a correction. EA went from $11 to $146. There is very little to read into those figures today other than the market overran its price and came back in line.

But the "consumer advocate Youtubers" will of course but it down to SJW's or some sillyness.

This. The S&P500 (an index that tracks the top 500 companies in the US) has a similar chart as the ones above. It was doing really well up until a couple of months ago and then it started dropping.

RedRochey

Hard to compare Sony to Take Two and EA given that Sony do a lot more than just games.

I also highly doubt investors are checking twitter to see complaints by gamers, think they rely on more fundamental and reliable data than that

johnny_ultimate

Also fair to say investors will never be *too* skittish about people on Twitter complaining about the lack of anime teenagers’ breasts on PS4.

Penn

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Sony don't really release exclusives to sell big numbers, it's just nice for them when they do. I find a lot of time Sony exclusives plug gaps in the software line up to make the system more appealing to a wider audience. And it's worked for them. Xbox seems to just target the traditional gamer audience while sony has always targeted the living room.

There's a far better benefit to Sony with exlcusives than sales of those titles. They sell more consoles.

But then to suggest Spiderman or GoW are selling poorly is ridiculous.

Yeah anytime Sony release a big exclusive there's an influx of people, particularly on Reddit but even here a lot of the time, who start posting about how they just got a PS4 because this game looks great and is getting such great reviews. Saw it happen particularly for Spider-Man, God of War and Horizon.

It's why Sony put so much money into big single-player story-driven exclusives; it doesn't just sell games, it sells consoles. They can take the hit on the game even if it doesn't recoup its cost as they make more on the console and associated costs (controllers, PS+, more games), plus the exclusives become an advert to drive future console sales. Ads where they can show highly-rated and acclaimed exclusives.

The games themselves selling well are a bonus, and a testament to the quality of the games in many respects. But while people tend to pick what console they want at the start of a console generation based on what they already have, what their friends will have etc, console exclusives are what really drives console sales later on in the console generation, where people might be tempted to pick up a second console.

While MS have been going for a different tactic of introducing features like GamePass, being more behind cross-platform play etc, the money they've likely spent buying up of numerous studios in order to start to focus more on exclusives shows just how vital exclusives are. Really with how little Sony have done to try and compete with those other features MS are pushing and how many of their practices have been somewhat anti-consumer, it's only the quality of their exclusives keeping them ahead of MS at this point.

kunst nugget

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Also fair to say investors will never be *too* skittish about people on Twitter complaining about the lack of anime teenagers’ breasts on PS4.

It would so funny if that was the cause of the slump in the stock market. 'We could handle the trade war with China and the international slow down of economic growth but when Sony censored those teenage boobies, we couldn't takes no more!!!'

Retr0gamer

Penn wrote: »

While MS have been going for a different tactic of introducing features like GamePass, being more behind cross-platform play etc, the money they've likely spent buying up of numerous studios in order to start to focus more on exclusives shows just how vital exclusives are. Really with how little Sony have done to try and compete with those other features MS are pushing and how many of their practices have been somewhat anti-consumer, it's only the quality of their exclusives keeping them ahead of MS at this point.

MS have a very good opportunity to turn the tables again next generation. They've made a lot of goodwill with the Xbox One in the last few months. And nobody screws up as badly as Sony in full arrogance mode.

I've a feeling though Sony might avoid the arrogance trap this time though. They've good management at the moment.

Robert ninja

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Also fair to say investors will never be *too* skittish about people on Twitter complaining about the lack of anime teenagers’ breasts on PS4.

Investors care about anything Sony caused by if they think it's upsetting customers and therefore profits. They're also human beings who use social media like anyone else but I'd wager none have been informed by Sony of their censorship campaign or the absolute disaster it has been. They had to re-upload this to reduce the dislikes and reset the comments (the vid has little to do with censorship, it's just being used as a vessel)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSH3rYkUDkE

It's driving creators away as well as consumers. The censorship campaign has so far only been a failure, making the Nintendo and PC versions seem like a better buy. It's bad sign when Nintendo (a brand known as family friendly) are even less strict about content.

In news

Again not much other than another game from the Agony lads
https://www.dualshockers.com/succubus-announcement-trailer/

Honestly... not seeing the appeal. Stiff animation and simple combat. Graphics and gore can only get you so far. These would probably be much better as VR experiences.

J. Marston

Robert ninja wrote: »

It's driving creators away as well as consumers. The censorship campaign has so far only been a failure, making the Nintendo and PC versions seem like a better buy. It's bad sign when Nintendo (a brand known as family friendly) are even less strict about content.

Everything in that article is in Japanese but the first image I see makes me think it's hardly a great loss.

Varik

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Also fair to say investors will never be *too* skittish about people on Twitter complaining about the lack of anime teenagers’ breasts on PS4.

Stick a pair on Bowser and stock goes up.

Penn

Retr0gamer wrote: »

MS have a very good opportunity to turn the tables again next generation. They've made a lot of goodwill with the Xbox One in the last few months. And nobody screws up as badly as Sony in full arrogance mode.

I've a feeling though Sony might avoid the arrogance trap this time though. They've good management at the moment.

Yeah, I don't think Sony will be a victim to arrogance as MS are very definitely starting to nip at their heels by offering the likes of Gamepass, Xbox exclusives for free on Day 1 with Gamepass, and buying so many studios. It's why I think Sony will save their own updated version of PS Now to compete more directly with what Gamepass offers at the start of the next gen. They may also close the gap performance-wise between the consoles, depending on what MS are planning for theirs. And if they continue support for VR and the price of it decreases for next gen (if rumours of the processor for it being included in the PS5 are correct), it could be the USP that MS doesn't have.

They just need to not get complacent. Arrogance took them down at the start of the PS3 era. Arrogance took down MS at the start of the XB1 era. I don't think either side will let it happen again next gen.

Retr0gamer

The vast majority of consumers aren't going to care about those sorts of games.

Robert ninja

Retr0gamer wrote: »

The vast majority of consumers aren't going to care about those sorts of games.

Sony was the king of 'those kinds of games' for a long time until recently. If they were only interested in what the vast majorty of consumers want then they'd not have done business with such creators and sold such games for the last decade or sell indies, AA or practically anything niche for that matter. Those consumers don't just buy one game from one genre, either. If consumers abandon Sony's platform for censorship reasons (and not just for tits) https://twitter.com/tsumori_/status/1056244025257328641

then they're losing customers who are potential customers for those big AAA multi plats, too - which we know they live off of.

In news

YY has put out a video detailing what's happening with devs abusing YT takedowns. https://youtu.be/RcCPjTZn6QA

kunst nugget

What's with the articles in Japanese? Practically nobody in this forum is going to understand them so they are not going to add anything to your argument.

Would these games sell in even the thousands in the West? Are Sony going to lose even a couple of thousand customers if they stop porting these over it censor them before porting. I don't think they are really comparable to Indies either. Sony are probably happy to have low performing Indies on their store because they help to enhance credibility - the games you're talking about would probably do the opposite and could be a potential embarrassment to Sony.