While I don’t care what the sales figures actually are, I’ve never been more interested in what they could potentially mean for a franchise.
It’s about to get real dark out there…
This thread is depressing. It seems to me that by rushing for an early 2016 release, Capcom has (maybe inadvertently) bet the farm on a very successful CPT 2016 that makes the game look so good it makes more casuals jump in the long run.
How viable is this? Perhaps with a significant price drop off the game (new players in 2017 will have to pay a lot for DLC characters anyway), could we see revenue for the game sustain on a F2Pish model from 2017 onwards?
I agree, I was trying to be generous and show that even under probably the best possible circumstances they wont come near their goal of 2million in first fiscal year.
I do think that 350~450k is possible for release week but it’ll drop by ~75% from that for week 2 and then keep dropping after that fairly quickly until it bottoms out at a steady but low number of sales each week. I’m guessing they will break 1million and change this fiscal year. A respectable amount. One nice thing is that with consistent new content they will see small sales spikes each time the new content is added. Nothing incredible in terms of raw numbers but probably a noticeable percentage increase over the week before. I can see, across all platforms and regions, a consistent 4~8,000 per week with jumps to 14~22,000 on new content releases for that week, if I had to wager a complete guess based on trends in Japan/Steam. Additional large jumps for steam sales and/or PS+ stuff. However no matter what I can’t see this hitting it’s goal unless we are SEVERELY underestimating what they made in the US on PS4 first 2 weeks.
As for players dropping off per week, you have to expect that. No matter what the first month or so is going to have a significantly larger player base than later on, and the farther from the release date the game is the lower the player base will be as they lose interest. Check how healthy the player base is 2 months and see if it sustains or not. It certainly wont grow past what it is on release when it still had that new game smell.
They could have easily done another SF4 CPT. Numbers were still strong, viewers still strong, you could still get games even if you were online. If anything it was like SF4 had just matured.
They could have packaged the thing different. Say it’s $30 for full beta access til June then full price after that. There’s so many ways they could have done what they wanted without putting it on the shelves.
It’s all about presentation these days. As long as people don’t think they are getting short changed they will buy excuses. The moment you say " this is the full game" all bets are off.
They never said it was the full game, they were pretty clear on the fact they were adding content in the future. However it wasn’t really made clear, to the public at large, how much content would be at launch. It certainly wasn’t made known to anyone who doesn’t follow the video game news close enough to read press releases and such on websites. People hear “new Street Fighter” and see a $60 price tag then find that a bunch of the content isn’t there at launch and may not know it’s coming soon for free will of course be pissed. When they pay the price of a game like say, GTAV, and find that a lot of stuff a normal consumer would expect in a fighting game is simply not there they get confused and irritated then word of mouth spreads.
I know one comic I follow on twitter (Joe DeRosa, guy did a long running podcast with Bill Burr) who was like “why can’t I play a first to three versus the CPU?” I had to explain that it was coming in a new update. He didn’t know, he also was irritated that the game didn’t have an arcade mode, which he said was what street fighter basically started with. He isn’t someone who reads joystiq or destuctoid, he doesn’t follow the FGC, he doesn’t know that Capcom is releasing content months down the line, he knows what street fighter is and he wants to play and he is expecting these features when he pays $60 for a game.
The people who knew of the lack of content on release make up a small percentage of the 2 million goal. Everyone else who tried the game out was sorely surprised by the state of the game. These ppl then warn others. I knew what to expect and even I found the actual product unacceptable. I also warn others. End result is what Capcom. The worst part of their idiotic plan is that I could not imagine any other outcome after experiencing it myself.
It isn’t just the sales numbers that are bad but the actual sales model. I’m a Small time TO outta Detroit with an Stream, and for my stream station I would love to have all the colors and costumes currently available and would pay real money for it, but that option isn’t there yet. Companies that make it hard to give them cash don’t stay open for long
Nope. SFV is SFIII all over again. Going to tank.
I post here pretty much every day, even I didn’t know there would be no decent battlelounge or that the CFN wasn’t fully operational. I thought they were just going to update the game with more characters, stages and the story mode.
I think we all though this would have some problems on launch, but coming off the back of a solid entry in SF4, I was a bit surprised. I was buying this day 1 regardless, I just didn’t imagine that a sequel would be of lesser quality than its predecessor. In gaming usually it’s about adding , not subrtacting.
What makes you think you are better qualified for anything with SF than those employed at Capcom?
This is the type of content Warner Bros Games spent money on in MKXL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b65O60aDwQo
35 minutes of animation of gruesome, non-humanitarian acts. And people here are pointing to MKXL as an example of content.
Virtually nobody says MKXL plays better or is more fun than SFV, yet nobody gives this a second thought and takes it for a given, when it’s not. It took work.
“The casual gamers” who didn’t feel they got their money’s worth with SFV failed to see the value in the competitive nature of this game.
1 month with online play, then an update with at least one new character, that you will probably get for free with Fight-money, is in no ways a bad deal!
But you evidently disagree, but I see no credit behind your business-field joyrides that you take in your posts, and I trust the people who delivered me SFV more than all of the self-entitled assumptions people are making in this thread.
What’s really getting to me is that you are “siding with the casuals” instead of supporting our community with optimism and good conversation, instead of rambling that “SFV is failing because of lack of content, etc”.
A lot of people are simply idiots. On the day of SFV’s release on Steam, it was storming with negative reviews, on day 1. Are these the kind of you people you really want to cater to?
There’s a saying that if you can’t beat 'em then join 'em. Maybe we should give it a try before we join the “casuals”?
I write a serious response and you have to make a joke out of it? Fine.
A serious response? You want me to ask for guys phone numbers online because Capcom can’t put a chat window in?!
No.
The predefined chat makes it convenient for PC and PS4 users alike to communicate everything they would need to that pertains to their gaming session already.
Apparently this wasn’t true. Wish it was.
So do you honestly think the potential addition of an actual chat box for those that might want to communicate is too much to ask for? How are you supposed to talk about a match up with someone if you’re stuck having to use “This is the path of my destiny!” to try and ask how many start up frames a move has?
A lot of the things people are upset about personally don’t bother me but being unable to communicate efficiently frustrates me to no end.
People not wanting to buy a game lacking content on release doesn’t make them idiots. It’s actually a smart idea because they wouldn’t be getting much out of it. And yeah, those “idiots” are very important when Capcom is hoping to sell 2 million before the end of March.
Also, what some of you don’t seem to **understand **is that “our kind” is NOT in the majority in this instance. The mere thought of a casual might make you feel disgusted, but those are the people who’ll ultimately decide if SFV will sell a lot of copies or not. Not appealing to them is stupid because it’s putting the longevity of the game in jeopardy. Competitive nature? You know there are a lot of people who don’t give a lick of shit at being competitive, right? How people choose to play the game is their business and they shouldn’t be belittled because of it. If they want to do an Arcade Mode playthrough with Laura 100 fucking times, it’s perfectly fine. That’s why making a versatile system aimed for *both *casuals and competitive players is the idle thing that’ll keep you from pissing off the masses.
Most of us here *want *to see SFV do well, but that fact alone *shouldn’t *keep one from calling out sloppy shit when it’s plainly obvious for anyone to see. Stop being so damn stubborn for a second and actually **try **to understand what people are saying. This isn’t hate at all.
Oh please. How are you going to talk trash or give advice with such chats like “It’s raining”.
Here is some simple math for “our kind”…
Capcom estimated they would sell 2 million units of SF5.
Evo’s biggest numbers of SF4 were what, like close to 2500 or something?
Let’s assume that this year they make it to 3k for SF5 entries.
Do some simple math…
(3,000 / 2,000,000) * 100 = .15
That is .15% of the total estimated users that purchased the game. Think about that for a second and how minuscule that is in the grand scheme of things. We are jack shit of the total number of people that Capcom estimated would purchase the game and line their pockets.
It baffles me that some people on this forum would think that the .15% of people Capcom cared about purchasing this game is more important than the 99.85% of people that they would hope purchased the game. If you really think Capcom doesn’t want those 99.85% of total estimated sales to be happy with the product, you are insane.
And yeah, throw on a few thousand more to that 3k number, for the people who are on this forum and don’t go to evo, and you still have a fraction of a percentage. We are nothing to the total margins.
Thread is stuck in limbo. The guy who said he will stop posting and everyone is arguing against, keeps posting.
Either way, it’s obvious Capcom was looking for a different type of audience when they are putting the FGC in their commercials. They definitely are trying to push into some other type of market that doesn’t involve discs getting off shelves.
And you never found a response to my question, which must be why you’re trying to “get me” now.
No, I don’t, but “Highlandfireball” was complaining over a lack of content earlier and his complaint has narrowed down to something like a traditional chat option.
I think that’s fine, but I still regard him as one of the “negativists” in this thread who just want to bash on SFV judging by his tone.
No, and what I said was that people bought the game on release and on the same day gave it a negative review - around 50% of the people did. Those guys are either idiots or juvenile if they can’t wait a few days and see how things get resolved because online play is indeed something that should work, so stopping your entire universe in time on that day because you don’t want to wait and see them get resolved in just a day or two is completely moronic to me.
It’s like calling customer service and instead of seeing your problem get resolved, shouting and cussing the moment somebody picks up the phone.
Having little offline-content is something I can’t agree with, because there is a financial budget and a time schedule to follow - the important things are here, and some things like a full story-mode didn’t make the time-schedule.
There is still things to do offline, and there is an endless amount of things to do online.
There is financial budget and a time schedule, and I’m more than happy with what Capcom has delivered.
Yes, that’s true, but I don’t believe SFV will do bad in sales, but I will await till fall or winter to get a picture of how SFV is doing financially, so if somebody like “Eternal” wants to paint a grim picture with possibly unreliable numbers right away, then he’s free to do so, but it’s counter-productive in my opinion, especially when people here in reality don’t have a fraction of the education and insight into things besides “PSN-numbers” or “Steam-numbers” that Capcom themselves do.
AFAIK Capcom doesn’t have a customer service number. Keeps the colorful word shouting casuals out their ear.