Ultimate MvC3 potentially an ultimate sales failure - Implications?

Classic Fighting Games Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3
581

the long combos do not appeal to the majority of gamers, maybee the 1% of l33ts… Amazon can dump Mortal kombat 9s for 40s becuase they bought so many whole sale as pre orders were insane…i bet they sold more special editions pre order with the pdp stick then marvel has sold altogether as they sold out in a day and had to try to get more… casuals dont want blazblue gameplay with marvel skins and shit flying at then from across the screen and comboes that go on for ever and they die.they dont want teleports and lazer beams that are so fast and have no recovery… they wanted faster version of street fighter with air dashs air blocks… also casuals will not buy capcom fighting games because they have learned that they are dupped with cgi trailers to find only a picture ending and no cgi cinematic storys…the farther they stray from the sf formula the more they might gain the 1% srk l33t community or the basement mouth breather neck beard,but that wont make the AAA title like the cod of fighting games… also the abcs buttons and not dedicated capcom 6 buttons lp mp hp lk mk hk turned off casuals ,i know i play with a ton on cod and talked alot into grabbing this game…they all played for 2-3 days and called the game fucking wierd and who the fucks half the losers on the roster and then said lets go play some street fighter…

I think Sf x tekken will be the nail in the coffin…if there is no mind games and footsies and its long linked combo launch switch team special…while the other person plays the punching bag and then you hope for your turn…

if they would have made mvc3 with teams no assists no abcd or auto air combos…basically a faster sf4 withe marvel charactors it would have sold so fucking well ono could buy a billion blanka toys.

Poeple always talk about mvc2 like alot of poeple played it hardcore they didnt,they liked watching not playing what they were seeing

582

dude… from day 1 sfxtk has been a footsie fighter.

SFIV = 3.1
Super = 1.8
AE = 0.8

People forget that Super was like a “GOTY” edition… pretty sure that SFIV GOTY with costume DLC @ a cheaper price alone would’ve done another 400k…

583

Cyclops wasn’t in because Marvel hates him, just like Capcom hates Mega Man. Cyclops is treated like s*** everywhere outside of comics.

Captain Commando wasn’t in because he’s an old character who wasn’t in any successful games (unlike Haggar, Arthur & Firebrand) & was replaced for newer Capcom characters.

Ken wasn’t in because Akuma filled the second shoto spot. (I would have preferred Ken though, & Bison over both shotos)

Cable wasn’t in because…I have no reason. That was a really stupid choice. He’s relevant in the comics, he’s a popular character & as you mentioned, he was one of MvC2’s gods. Maybe Capcom is saving him for DLC/Uncanny edition?

584

the thing is redundant or not, Ken would’ve had more people buy this game than 90% of the cast. There’s a reason he’s on pre order t-shirts with kazuya in australia… he’s fucking popular.

585

Capcom continuing to distance itself from ultimate:
“Could you please put Bad Box Art Mega Man in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 too? — ACBreaker Rey Jimenez: Interesting, but unless the team planned for him to be in UMvC3 as a DLC character, it would be very hard to do. It’s near impossible post release to add content to a title that wasn’t planned for before the title was released.”

Sven few days ago ‘no balance updates planned for umvc3’

I think it’s a bad strategy to just drop support for the product after poor sales, heres a post i made on capcom unity suggestion box, probably falling on deaf ears but worth a shot:

"Umvc3 is a great game and capcom’s best figher in a long time, just because it didn’t sell that well dosen’t mean capcom should give up supporting it altogether, it’s punishing those who have continued to support capcoms games, reciprocating support should be a goal for such a ‘community minded’ company like capcom. Sf4 got continued support (and ended up with an incredible final product balance wise it can take its hat off to for years to come), sfxt is reportedly getting balance support post release so WHY does mvc3 now get the shaft? It’s not the hardcore fans fault the game didn’t sell well, ultimate was marketed as having post release continuous support and possibly a whole host of dlc chars, now its being pushed aside and capcom is acting like the game never happened…

Well its not the fans fault it didn’t sell, the fans didn’t force capcom to release an unfinished product for the original mvc3 vanilla, the fans didn’t force capcom to choose mostly obscure and unknown chars for ultimate, it’s not the fans fault ultimate was also rushed out the door for release less than a yr after the original. The fans should expect support for a product they paid for with their own hard earned cash, a product touted pre release as having the right infrastructure for future dlc releases, now sven claiming it’s ‘near impossible’ to release dlc not pre planned, was this before or after the sales figures came in? It’s highly unethical for capcom to drop support for a product that is essentially the face of their fighting game division so readily.

The eports phenom is taking off and umvc3 could have been at the fore front, now the issues with game will allow the braindead overpowered tactics to rise and take over again (much like vanilla) which culls capcoms credibility as a fighting game producing company and its reputation in the esports world, the flaws of umvc3 will be exposed for the world to see this evo, and this will reflect highly on capcoms position within esports, so i hope capcom is aware of this, umvc3 is a flag ship title for them community wise, and it should be treated as such. Also how about not throwing in the towel with ultimate sales and rebranding, add cyclops/gambit/juggerernaut/megaman and rerelease the box art with these dudes on the cover, guaranteed a jump in sales in the west. Also esports should be viewed as a marketing tool, if umvc3 is kept legitimately competitive with balance support and the esports phenom continues to rise, this could be a form of perpetual marketing and sales for years to come for little investment $$. Please consider this!"

Look for it here http://www.capcom-unity.com/go/suggestion/box click last week tab and vote it up so they see it!

586

no balance patches is a GOOD thing, let the damn game breathe

587

Just from my personal experience trying to convince my more casual friends to play UMVC3, the biggest reasons they didn’t pick it up was:

  1. Released too soon after MVC3. Should have been DLC.
  2. Frustration that [obscure character, mostly Rocket Raccoon] got in while [popular character, mostly Megaman] did not.
  3. Balance issues, mostly revolving around the perception that some characters [mostly Wesker] can win with little effort

I also had one hardcore friend buy it, only to return it because the HUD was so damn confusing and it was frustrating him to lose because of wrong tags and snap-backs.

588

what really matters is sales margins. how much did they spend making UMvC3 and did they profit from it’s low sales? i wonder how many of the new characters were actually cut from the first game because of time constraints and so they may have used the first game’s budget. it may have made enough profit for capcom but we would need to know how much they actually spent on this version of the game.

589

I was already pretty disappointed with MVC3 due mostly to all the massive 1 hit kill combos, I know
a lot of people were in the same boat, so it’s ridiculous to expect us to by an overpriced crapcom
update just 10 months after the vanilla release for a game we aren’t overly enthusiastic about already.

I know a ton of people got bored of MVC3 within a month of its release and promptly returned to playing Street Fighter 4 and various other games.

590

MvC3 was a bit too cheap for even casual gamers. Cheap tactics that some are easy to use. Applied that to UMvC3 then people started to just not buy it. I had a couple friends who didn’t buy UMvC3 because MvC3 was so cheap with its’ X-factor and Phoenix.

Plus it got boring to alot of ppl too. The game is still played tho but even I admit I don’t watch it on streams for too long.

591

Then comes the question of if they will even revisit with a balance patch. When is it right to have a balance patch?
They are obvious example is something is broken but that question is harder to answer than it should be.

Ken DLC character would have been so good. He is popular and it would be somewhat unexpected. there character choices were a bit odd and no new female characters as well. Could have at least added two females(Psylocke, Ms. Marvel for example)

Also why would they release an expansion in the SAME year. It doesn’t make much sense. It is pretty dumb. Feels like you got cheated to buying the first version of the game.

592

i hope never, myself. i think it would be great if capcom just completely left sf4 and mvc3 alone and put all their “efforts” into sfxt. it would stop stuff like sentinels completely unnecessary nerf from ever happening again

593

Okay gotta set some things straight…

SFIV
Vanilla - 3.1+ million copies
Super - 1.7+ million copies
AE - Unknown but most likely 400k+ copies

MvC3
Vanilla - 2.0+ million copies
Super - Estimated 200k+ copies(GAF NPD numbers with 360 being dominant)
AE - Not released yet

*Vanilla was an incomplete and rushed product that got rushed out two months early because LP2 bombed and Capcom needed a game to pad numbers
*The lack of spectator mode, a shitty 10 combo mission mode, the shittiest arcade mode outside of KOF, glitches and horrible online killed the game
*The lack of basic online functionality put all the game’s hopes of hype and longevity on the tournament scene. Not fucking cool…
*Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix… what the fuck were they thinking when they made the top 5 and put in invincible assists? Soul crushing… game crushing…
*Dante’s dumb reach, Magneto with the fastest beam/mobility, Wolverine’s berdurper barrage, Wesker’s fullscreen gun combos/XF3 and more. Who let the marketing department handle balance?
*Their DLC character choices were terrible. No one cares for sex slave Jill and Shuma Gorath should have been a part of the cast(not a DLC character)
*Capcom didn’t even bother to support Vanilla and went dead quiet. We got a sequel 8 months later compared to Vanilla that got 1 year+ to breathe
*UMvC3 got rushed again and Niitsuma’s original 58 character roster vision was scrapped. Fans were pissed. Still could be fixed with DLC
*The roster choices for the sequel were stupid. A sausagefest and a raccoon. Still this could be been fixed by DLC
*Capcom’s roster choices were good. They gave fans Strider and Phoenix even though Nemesis was kinda marketing for ORC. Phoenix sucked though lol
*Marvel’s new side is dumb as fuck. No one knows or cares about them outside of Dr.Strange and Iron Fist. Everyone else was wtf. Not a single vet like Strider
*Capcom gives Mahvel fans the impression that we play second fiddle to SF(we do). Shit, the opening trailer isn’t even complete and doesn’t animate. shit

It’s one rushjob after another despite the fact that UMvC3 was a big step up from their predecessor. The MvC3 series has by far surpassed MvC2 in terms of balance, graphics and basic gameplay as a fighter, but Capcom’s suits have done every damned thing possible to stop this game from selling the numbers it should. Marvel has also really fucked around with roster choices and killed the most important part of the series for fans of the games… the goddamn characters. Capcom probably wanted the game to follow the SFIV update numbers with 50% of the previous audience moving to the next game, but that is probably impossible with UMvC3 because people are just bitter after all the rushing, Marvel’s commercial dickery and the fact that other great fighting games are coming out now. Also, Ken, Cable and Cyclops are not the reason this game hasn’t sold. It’s a sausagefest with lots of X-men MvC2 throwbacks and a good amount of Street Fighters(perfect amount, but they could add Bison). We don’t need no more gi wearing dudes, put in another cool female like Emma or Psylocke for the X-men slot plz and thanks. Cable is a big meh to me since we already got three of the MvC2 god tiers in the game… leave vet slots for MvC1 vets like a symbiote and Gambit.

Dammit I hated typing all of this up because I love Marvel, guys. I played the living shit out of MvC1 and it was the greatest thing ever. Suits at both companies messing with my game. Just give Niitsuma the time and money you give to Ono so Niitsuma can make a real fighting game with Skullgirls/BlazBlue/VF4 tutorials, BlazBlue CS2 Netcode, UMvC3 Vita version replays/hitbox data(lol), Skullgirls/SFxTekken online training mode, button checks and some full intro cutscenes dammit.

594

where are you getting your sources at for the sales? I’m pretty sure those numbers are inaccurate. Your post also is unnecessarily long.

595

Agreed. They kinda left the casual fans out of MvC3 and ultimately MvC3. Casual people LOVE Story mode and nice other modes like Team Battle, Survival, optional game.

Heroes and Herald was a step in the good direction but it came out much too late. Alot of the potential fans didn’t play it since not many bought UMvC3 in the first place. MK9 was the best fighting game for 2011 and I agree it is in general with it’s story mode and other features. It is not just about fighting but the other stuff with it.

SF X T, despite the gem stuff, kinda gets this to make some extra neat features on the game. Just fighting online makes ppl lose their attention span for the game.

It effects the tourney scene since the game growth can grow more with the casual base playing your game.

596

I’m airing all of my grievances because I want to like UMvC3 and the Mahvel 3 games despite the bullshit. The numbers come from NeoGAF’s NPD numbers thread for November. UMvC3 360>Wii CoD(100k)>UMvC3 PS3. I’m surprised that people actually trust VGChartz. Most people know their numbers aren’t reliable and Sven even laughed at them.

Don’t call it bitching if you want information next time.

Agreed on H&H. It’s something you can just fuck around with and good fun. Capcom gets points for that and their DLC cotumes are also very nice. It’s a shame that Marvel got in the way of alternate colors…

597

I’m agreing with everything exept the marvel cast part.

Marvel with it cattered to the comic-book reading fanbase, the one they care about. RR is pretty popular and Nova is a superstar since annihilation. well some pages back i did some long post explaining it.

Cast wasnt made for MvC fans, Capcom side made it for capcom fans and marvel side made it for marvel fans (the ones they are getting money from, not the "oh i watched cartoons 15years agon “fan” ")
Wich is the right seing as mvc fan (ie FG fan) take to acount that character are played mostly because of their gameplay and not the backround. (Sent in mvc2 is kind of the perfect example, or is the generique big robot cannon fodder without personality the most popular thing in xmen?).

598

cool

UMvC3 is still a great game. It is just hampered by a bunch of extraneous bs that doesn’t entice the moderates or casuals at all. The game still sold much more than 30k like people assumed though.

599

The marvel cast was picked by disney cause those chars are in upcoming marvel movies (some arent even out for years) so it was a rly fkn stupid forcing of capcoms hand cause it basically helped kill the game sales wise altogether.

Nickguy retard playing vanilla sf4/mvc3 to the end of the time i can think of nothing worse, do u even play any of these games or just post about how cool mvc2 was

600

Casuals are a hard fan base to keep interested because the learning curve of FG’s is radically different than pretty much any other game out there and is counter-intuitive. How many games require that you practice your moves (and then combos, and then resets, and then punishes, and then…) for extended periods of time in order to have a chance to compete? Even a game like Dark Souls has a sissy learning curve by comparison because all you have to do is figure out how to beat an enemy with pretty simple (and familiar controls) instead of saying to yourself “okay, if I want to win this I need to worry about footsies, have meter management, learn how to bait and punish mistakes, figure out all the instances I have frame advantage, figure out a team that works meaning I have to maybe learn characters that are awkward to me because I can’t do the motions easily but they have good assists, WHY CAN’T I BEAT WESKER, etc, etc.” Most games have lots of stepping stones to get you acclimated to the game (and are very easy to grasp) plus reward you by simply playing the game (aka CoD getting more stuff as you play, having simple controls to point and shoot) whereas FG’s literally beat you until do your homework or learn after copious amounts of experience.

Few people want to purchase a game and spend the limited free time they have practicing combos and basically learning a new branch of science or just lose over and over again. The one simultaneous strength and weakness FG’s have by design is that the vast majority of the content of the game is determined by how much you want to challenge yourself and and get better than other people who are also into FG’s. The amount of time I had to invest to be able to actually play the game and not look like an idiot must have been easily in the 500’s of hours (maybe even 1000’s) if you combine the time in the lab, watching videos, reading forums and playing matches AND I STILL SUCK still compared to the vast majority out there who take it seriously.

My guess is the main reason you see such large drops between the vanilla’s of a game and the “super” updates is that most people (consisting mostly of casuals and intermediates) have decided spending more time with the game isn’t worth the money. Vanillas probably sell well because it is something new or potentially familiar because of something regarding the game. Casuals may say “Hey, I’m a Marvel fan (or something similar), I’ll check this out!” However, once they run into what I’ll call the “FG wall” you need to cross to get to get to the fun part of the game or beat someone at a higher level, they probably say “doesn’t matter who they add, how they balance it, etc, this isn’t worth my time when I can pick from the vast array of other games out there and get right to the fun parts.”

I think pinning the low sales on anything else is just unsubstantiated conjecture as many other games have updated on relatively short time lines, added far less content then UMvC3 did and don’t see the types of sale drops FG’s see when they put out updates.