I can definitely vouch for this… I am completely new to fighting games, decided to jump into online play for fun and went 0-30 >.< Everyone seemed to know what they were doing to some extent.
This release was indeed terribly timed.
First off, releasing within a few weeks of MW3, Arkham City, Skyrim, Skyward Sword, and Saint’s Row 3? What the hell were they thinking? They honestly might have been better served releasing after *The Avengers *comes out next year; that’d be some of the best advertising for this game they could hope to get, and it’d avoid the “two games in one year” complaint. *The Avengers *is likely to be a massive blockbuster success, and if they can then advertise UMvC3 as the game that lets Timmy and Johnny make a team out of all their favorite Avengers and fight some of their favorite Capcom characters, I suspect they’d stand to sell more games. At the very least, March or April would’ve been better, and would have allowed them to market H&H (the mode designed to appeal to casual players) as part of the game.
Second, they really did need to include some characters with more star power in Ultimate. RR may be an interesting character from a gameplay perspective, but he does nothing for sales; some of the better known X-Men (Gambit, Cyclops, Rogue) or the glaringly obvious Megaman would have been a far better choice than some of the obscure characters they stuffed in from a sales perspective.
If Capcom doesn’t realize that they should have included Megaman after this likely fiasco, well, I don’t even know what to say. And I’m not someone who wanted Megaman in particularly badly, just pointing out that he certainly would have helped sales a fair bit.
Well UMVC3 is still going to be released on PS Vita which I assume is going to be less than half the sales of UMVC3.
I don’t really see this as too big of a deal in general since this is just another one of those “too many wrong things at the wrong time” kinda deal. This was kind of destined to happen and the game wasn’t going to sell as much as the original either way. At least the original got in some nice hard sales and at this point the people who play the game seriously can just play it. For tournament players of the game this is somewhat of a good thing I would say even because that means it’s less likely the game is going to get changed up a bunch in 4 months and maybe we can actually flesh out the game like the old days instead of all of that Ono change bullshit from SFIV.
Some of the reasons I feel this all happened pretty much come down to
1. People just didn’t feel justified paying 66 percent of the original game’s price for 12 new people, a functioning online mode they feel they should have gotten from the get go and a game that in general should have been playtested and reviewed further before release. I kind of agree that releasing a game out into the open probably helped find a lot of shit that makes Ultimate a better game now but, first impressions count.
**2. It’s too old school. ** The more I played this game the more I realized how just old school cheap the game is. One frame throws that lead to damage for a lot of the characters (SFIV’s throw system is so tame and forgiving in comparison), nearly unblockable situations can occur regularly in the match, very little defensive options outside of a really exaggerated pushback on advance guards (that can easily be overcome by staggered block strings, throws or assists) and XF guard cancels which allow you to kill off a character free unless they had real safe pressure going on, block strings that can last forever, generally the game brings back a lot of the old school overwhelming situations that made the old games as cheap as they were. I figured the game would be more like TvC but the game basically forces being cheap like the old days and even puts in systems like XF that basically allows you to be even cheaper to get back in the fight just by pressing on 4 buttons.
When SFIV was basically teaching people that “you don’t need to be in bad situations cuz we’re going to make the entire mechanics around giving you ways to get out of everything”, MVC3 is like “time to get FUCKED again”. I think it was just too radical of a change from a lot of people who were used to SFIV’s more collected pace where most of the time you’re just losing to footsies, dragon punches or dive kicks at worst. Which as you can see from streams and the stuff posted here…people have no problem complaining about the softest shit that happens in SFIV. Dark Phoenix in general I’m sure scared off several casual players and showed them that in the old fighting games…low health didn’t mean bad…low health meant “you were fucking cheap as fuck and we have to give this character low health for you to MAYBE beat them”.
SFIV in general made fighting games look like they’re these nice fair games where you can just get out of everything bad that happens to you. Which is one of the big reasons I couldn’t wait to get off that game when something else came out. I knew that shit is not what the old fighting games were about so I’m hoping other games like KOF13 and Skullgirls retain more of that old school “get put in bad situations” stuff that I prefer. SFIV just didn’t feel like a real fighting game to me at all. I used to think it was funny how Shinji Gohan would run up and down about how good SF EX is…but I’d rather play that any day over SFIV now cuz I’m sure it would feel more like an old school fighter than SFIV.
3. The most obvious and probably most important. Too many damned games coming out. This was a bad time to release the game in general. I live literally down the road from the company that makes the Elder Scrolls games and the hype for that game was surely through the roof and the reviews for the games are all over the place online and on TV for Skyrim. You regularly see shit like “one of the best video games ever made” quotes from game reviewers and what not. That stuff attracts people already. Do you wanna be UMVC3…or do you wanna buy one of the best games ever made? Especially with how quick hot games come out these days and how the economy is…dudes ain’t gonna be jumping the gun to buy the version of MVC3 they feel they should have gotten day one.
4. When it comes down to it…with the resurgence of fighting games it’s just impossible to have every one sell well any way. When there’s a big pool of games for a genre of games that’s pretty niche already…you get to a point where sometimes you sell and sometimes you don’t. The first version of any game is always going to sell the most and then after that you really have to have perfect marketing and timing to sell after that for semi sequels and what not. This was basically Capcom trying to get people hype for GGXX # Reload and welll…didn’t quite work out as planned it seems.
Vanilla wasn’t really that unbalanced if you really consider anything. No less unbalanced than MVC2 was.
UMVC3 is balanced the right way like the old days. Make sure everybody is cheap and has good shit. SFIV did too much taking away everything good from everybody so everybody would be balanced because they would all be bland and uninteresting. ** I knew something was going really wrong with the game when they nerfed Gen in Vanilla. That was pretty much the end of that game being interesting or having any real old school type balance. Poor Gen…the signal of Bore Fighter IV. The game is a solid game I just feel like there was way too much knee jerk stuff for the sake of balance instead of just letting strong characters balance themselves.**
At least since it’s UMVC3 if you HAVE to play Tron you can still make a strong team around her and have things not be half bad overall. You’ll have your bad matchups but it’s not like Tron has to be the only character on your team like a one on one game. UMVC3 allows you to be more creative even with lower tiered characters.
I will tell you the truth… UMvC3 it’s not selling so much because of: Blockbusters like COD, Skyrim, Battlefield, Batman, Ass Creed, and others around this date… Same as KOF XIII, it’s not selling a lot because of that…
I stopped reading after the SFIV reference… And laughted… How MvC3 can be like SFIV?, a turtle heavy game, a slow paced game, do you want a slow paced game, a balanced one?, SFIV was NEVER balanced, AE2012 will have Cody and Juri as the most broken chars of AE now, AE got the fuckin Twins, Fei Long and Viper, SSFIV got Viper, Guile and Rufus, SFIV got Sagat. What, the, hell…
They should be pushing the fact that UMvC is stand-alone and only $40. That would at least make it stand out somewhat to the people buying holiday gifts.
Umvc3 which in the eyes of a casual isn’t a squeal went up against
Skyrim, MW3, Assassin Creed, Saints Row, Need for speed, Halo, a lego’s game (which sell really well) and a metal gear solid collection remake.
Honestly I was fighting the urge to not play skyrim the entire time I was playing marvel and I’m a die hard fighting game player and marvel fan…I can only imagine random people. No one was gonna suggest umvc3 out of that list of games. Most are still upset that it came out 9 months later.
Makes sense this PoS isn’t selling more. I would have probably killed myself if I had bought this game for 40$
30.000k would be actually the best selling fighting game of all time lol.
A $40 expansion pack with the same lack of content as the original with some extra characters and the online features that should have been there in the first place and hit at the height of the blockbuster holiday season didn’t sell well?
lol.
I love Ultimate, but when you start the series off without anything to keep players interested for an expansion you can’t possibly expect to have success by kicking the same empty shell of a game out the door. Heroes and Heralds not even being out at launch is just icing on the already hilarious lack of content.
THat’s tough to say.
I tihnk its moreso that capcom and moreso companies in general need to stop with the bullshit. If you were in the know or just saw something was up, you knew a new version of mvc3 was coming you just didn’t know when, and when it came within 6+ months is just stupid. It should’ve been obvious anyways after the shadow battles that there weren’t going to be many other balance patches or additional content added until a disc came out (unless you want to DL 1-3 gigs for 1500 MS points or something)
Marvel Ultimate Alliance had a in depth story mode where you learned all about the characters. Lack of story really hurts Capcom from penetrating the casual market more.
Everything else has been said – coming out too early, so many blockbuster titles around the same time. UMVC3 obviously should’ve been DLC. As a hardcore fighting gamer I’m glad we got the game, and it’s too bad Capcom’s expectations weren’t met, but the lesson should be learned: release new characters and balance patches as DLC for current titles and reserve disc releases for completely new games.
If they had patched Phoenix instead of Sentinel, we could have played Vanilla for a lot longer and they could have taken their time to fine tune and buff/nerf the right characters.
So that’s two releases in a row where they’ve had to make excuses for the game’s lack of content and/or polish?
lol.
I could see that actually being the case. Japanese developers usually don’t have a good handle on what the Western market is doing. They probably didn’t identify things like Skyrim and Battlefield 3 to be real threats to their marketshare. Hell, in japan, even MW3 beat out the latest Tales games.
It’s a big problem when devs simply look at their own region instead of globally. It’s even more bewildering with this game since the Vs series has ALWAYS been more popular in north america than it has been in japan, you’d think that Capcom would be tailor making this thing for western audiences. But I think Dead Rising 2 and Lost Planet 2 have made them gun-shy about listening to input from Western Devs, which is a real shame.
I severly doubt that it’s only sold 30,000 units, as VGChartz tends to be wrong on anything not released for over 6 months, but look at what this holiday has to offer. Uncharted 3, Skyrim, MW3, BF3, I don’t see the average mom popping into walmart and picking this game up to put under the tree, nor do I see little timmy casual picking this game up over any of the bigger names.
Capcom, much like Ubisoft and Rayman, doesn’t have a firm grasp of their position in the market. This was the absolute worst time release this year, and they’re going to pay for it. And unfortunately that means we’ll pay for it.
Though looking at the change logs and how the game plays now and looking how much effort is being placed into Street Fighter X Tekken, it makes me wonder if they always wanted this game to fail.
Well , i didn’t play the original MvC3 . But I think I got my moneys worth in buying UMvC3. My friends told me to try the game out since they are trying to get competitive and need some more sparring partners so I decided to pick it up. Nothing to be disappointed about for 40$. The only gripe I really have is the steep ass learning curve. Lol, its pretty much your getting your ass whooped or whipping some ass. No really in the middle players in this game.
This.
My theory is that they only had the rights to Marvel for the first quarter of 2011. Then they realized they weren’t doing so hot with deadlines and had to rush a product that they weren’t all that happy about. Still, they did good sales-wise so the team quickly re-negotiated a sequel with Capcom higher-ups who looked at said sales and went “all right, let’s do this” and ran it by Marvel who said “Fine but it has to be 2011 because movies and other games” and the team went “holybbq that’s way too little time, don’t wanna rush it!” marketing said “Tough. it can’t be December because of holidays, it can’t be march because of license” developers team went " 
alright then… november it is :("
And we got our (still-kinda-rushed-but-at-least-complete-version-oh-wait-wheres-heroes-and-heralds-screw-it-lets-make-it-DLC) game.
This is pretty interesting to read given my experience with the midnight release of this game…
At the EB that I went to (that’s Canuckistanian Gamestop) there were far more people there for UMvC3 than any of the other 8 game releases that night. There were 2 for AC3 (in top-notch Ezio cosplays actually), 1 for Halo Anniversary, I think 2 or 3 for Saints Row…and 16 for UMvC3.
To be fair, it’s not like they didn’t know it was coming.
Look at SFIV’s sales to SSFIV. It wouldn’t have matter if people have Megaman, Gambit, Venom.
It would have changed NOTHING!
It comes down to the fact that outside of the FGC there was no hype at all. No ads on TV, no stories on major gaming websites, nothing. I went to my local EB Games(Gamestop for the Americans out there) on Saturday and the guy said I was the second person to buy the game since it’s release. There was a line of over 350 people wrapped around store for the midnight release of MW3 and that game was a disgrace to first person shooters.
End of the day, charging $40 for what really amounts to 8 DLC characters and stages that are literally the same with different lighting and effects, literally months after it’s initial release just rubs the average gamer the wrong way. Throw in the fact that there were absolutley no ads on television like there are for Battlefield and Assasins Creed and Gears of War and what not, you’re going to get horrible sales.
EDIT: Plus it’s discouraging as hell for new and casual players to hop online into “beginner lobbies” and get the crap beat out of them over and over again by guys who are ranked like 250 on the leaderboards because they think it proves a point.