I don’t see the situation so bad but if sales aren’t satisfactory for capcom they always could go with a free 2 play model with a limited roster and no additional offline content, so they don’t piss off the customers who already bought the game. the missing content could then be offered in the ingame store. I mean the infrastructure for that plan is already in there.
Remember when comparing Lol or Dota to SF5, they are free while Street Fighter 5 is a full priced game. I have played LOL casually over 5 years and used less money to it than I paid for SF5. I have played Dota casually over 2 years and never paid a cent. There are many, many reasons why Mobas are more popular than fighters but price is pretty high on that list.
I call bullshit on that number as digital distributors don’t release sales numbers.
You can call it whatever you want, but every region where sales numbers have been released the game has severely under preformed. Just how long do you expect casual players or any players to sit staring at the fuc*ing loading screen waiting for a match? Then whenever they get a brief reprieve from the waiting game intense lag and rage quitters await them. You can check steamspy for the sales numbers, or just continue to ignore the fact that every report in every region has listed the games sales as very low. The glass isn’t even half full here, not in terms of content or sales.
there’s at least 180k copies sold. was sniffing around player profiles and eventually got to someone with 81LP who was ranked #182k. that’s not including people who haven’t played ranked for whatever reason, and the unfortunate souls who have fewer than 81LP.
which i guess is pretty good considering that you either a) need a PS4 or b) need a decent PC rig to play this game. it’s still doing much better than any other fighting game that’s been released on PS4 and i’m not particularly worried about the future of the game.
even if the game is deemed a flop and capcom cancels their plans for additional characters beyond the ones that are already done/being worked on, the game is still really fucking good and is going to be played at tournaments for a few years. and capcom will be fine as long as they keep making monster hunter games.
i don’t know the sales numbers but i’m pretty sure the amount of money that went into the game’s production for the first season isn’t so dependent on it’s early sales. there is still a lot more stuff coming out regardless if it does well or not. i’m hoping that will pick up interest in the game and with CPT and EVO, i expect higher interest for sure. that said, it’s hard for me to believe some people just won’t call this launch what it is. a disaster.
you have to realize all that extra money Capcom are missing out on because they launched it way too soon. i bet it will affect future sales and the franchise itself. i don’t think it’s enough to kill off SF but right now the game is just a meme for disaster on the internetz. it’s going to have to be a monster sleeper hit to gain all those potential sales back, and it has to please the investors because i don’t see how they’re not scared to death right now.
Here’s the problem with this. If that model fails, then the industry as we know it is sunk.
These days AAA games do not recoup their entire investment on disc sales alone.
Thanks to a basic rule of economics called inflation we’re actually paying less and less per disc for something that continues to cost more to make.
These days, a good chunk of a game’s profits actually come from post launch content.
Take a look at EA’s earnings from 2014. Out of the $2.2 billion they made from games, nearly $1 billion ($921 million) was from post launch content. If I break it down into a pie chart, this is what it looks like.
http://i.imgur.com/TdVQqwE.jpg
Take note that that was in 2014 when this trend was first identified.
These days, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to half of a game’s earnings coming from DLC.
Now consider that Capcom plans to support Street Fighter V until at least 2020 or 2021. It’s highly likely that their projections for the game’s lifetime earnings have an even greater portion coming from post launch content. Their model in this case is actually closer to Riot’s where the game itself is more of a service. The initial sales are just there to pad numbers and make a quick buck, while laying the seeds for the main business model.
There was a time when this was the main way of making money with video games. That time is long past.
People nowadays are buying less and less “flavor of the month” games and sticking more to their favored IPs and franchises.
The only space where the single “flavor of the month” purchase model is still working is for smaller games and indies.
Highly doubt that’s gonna happen. Their entire business plan for SFV is based on continually offering content for at least 5 years.
Look at the chart. We ain’t scurred.
I actually do not care about the industry. It does not bother me if it crashes and burns.
Capcom has an easy as hell backup plan if the sales are really as bad as everyone thinks:
Capcom wants the League of Legends model. Capcom wants the League of Legends audience. The game already has a LOL style shop coming next month.
The difference? LOL is F2P. Or it was when it came out of beta. By then, there were already 31 characters. By the end of September, SFV will already be at 22 characters. You don’t need as many characters in a fighting game as a moba, so with a 22 character roster, and a fully functioning single player mode, I think Capcom can go F2P, with a 6 character weekly rotation, and selling the original 16 characters for $40.
In fact, I’m damn sure that something like this is going to happen anyways. Capcom wants to go full esports and everything. The question isn’t if, but when. The bad sales may push up their schedule.
I contemplated not buying next gen at all and just sticking to old games, then I saw KI and was like fugg it. Then saw SFV and was like fugg it some more.
I think the game is great and I disagree with people saying SFV had no hype, there was quite a lot of hype from what I’ve seen, less than SFIV yes but still.
The problem is that they really fucked it up. Just because you say “FREE UPDATES DON’T WORRY” people are not going to give you a pass, I don’t know what they were thinking. Even myself, expecting a product lacking content, was sad/mad when I saw the actual game.
I played all the PC betas and there is a lot of stuff that I saw in the betas where I thought, damn this is bad but it’s beta. They actually all ended up in the game.
The story mode is probably the biggest joke I have ever seen in any game since I play. This is a piece of shit, when you play it you litteraly feel like Capcom f***** you. Don’t know how you can approve this art, how you can approve this voice acting and how you can make an AI this bad. I know full story mode is in June, but this is worst than a joke that’s a huge slap in your face.
Then there is survival mode where for some reason they thought it would be a great idea to use grinding worst than in a FTP game on a 60$ game. I accept the business model with skins and characters buyable with money or with Fight money but I do not accept grinding shit out like a chinese farmer on a game I payed for, especially if I have to grind against an AI. I unlocked all the colors for my main but there is no way I am touching this again.
Then there is online mode that’s working better each day but didn’t work on release which I expected (happens for every game) but Capcom should have expected it too because what it left them with is a training mode and a versus mode.
In one hand I would like SFV to do well, again I love the gameplay, but on the other hand they deserve to fail. They did nothing to succeed.
What I’ve learned from this.
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Western companies are spending tremendous amounts creating products, eastern companies are not, least of all Capcom. Do not let Japanese companies tell you their games are insanely expensive to create without showing numbers. You might think that they aren’t making money at launch and have lame DLC strategies in place to turn profits, but you don’t really know that.
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Do not endorse these modern business models. Reject them. Make companies to go back to business models that force them to do more with less. If you ask a 31 year old what their favorite game of all time is, it will not be a game from the current gen. It will be a very good game from a time when games were proportionately less expensive to produce.
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This problem stems from the fact that a few giant western companies had certain franchises that they would spend ungodly amounts of money on to make ungodly profits. Everyone seen this and have tried to replicate it, or at least look like they are copying the strategy in Capcom’s case. Capcom’s not putting a comparative level of funds in its games as its western peers; they replicate this strategy out of sheer greed not necessity. This is an industry of parody but the simple fact is, this was never a business model that was meant to be adopted by everyone. Companies should have just stayed in their lane; now they’re spending more money than they can legitimately make back and need a bail out in the form of recurring DLC for time immemorial.
These companies have to take a step back and figure out how to make games good but cheaper, or revert back to previous levels of cost v profit. The gaming industry is the only industry not doing this, but I guess they feel they don’t have to; the masses will buy anything that looks pretty. But they are playing a very risky and sill game.
This still doesn’t address the fact that videogames have been immune to inflation, which is driving profits down since we’re paying less now than we did before ($60 today < $60 ten years ago).
A good part of the reason why they need DLC is that, more often than not, retail sales aren’t enough to recoup costs.
Also, last I checked, a good number of Japanese companies were spending more in the AAA space due to bad practices, such as constantly reinventing the wheel by making proprietary engines for just 1 or two games (Square, Konami and even Capcom fell into this last gen with Crystal Tools, the Fox Engine and MT Framework engines respectively).
One other things, recurring DLC and the “games as a service” model also help with providing support for the competitive scene. Since eSports is a marketing activity, and it’s main job is to promote sales of stuff like DLC content. At the same time, the money made here is what Capcom will be pumping back into the FGC in terms of CPT prize pools. While some of you may not care for it, for a number of us who have been running tournaments and events, this is the type of developer support that we’ve been dreaming of for some time now.
You’re very welcome. Good to see some are actually not so blind. Kappa
It doesnt include digital sales which is a pretty big fucking deal. Relax. Also, dlc these days produce more revenue than initial purchase. So to summarize this: stfu y’all are talking out of your asses.
Don’t forget digital numbers. More than 50% of sales these days are digital. For SF4 that was 0%.
Amazon gave the game a price drop already since it’s been hammered in their user reviews and the disastrous PC sales are now being openly reported in various articles.
could you post some links please?
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