Oh, I didn’t see the article.
Doesn’t sound like a bomb to me, and the article says that the whole game industry took a bit of a dive. I’m not sure he’s saying it did “well” though; more like “okay” fromt he way Sven worded it. Still, I think a lot of people were hesitant to buy it after Vanilla came out the same year. A lot of people I’ve talked to have expressed that sentiment, though “a lot of people” is vague of me to say and in no way representative of an entire consumer base.
Sounds fine, 600K for a sequel to a game the casuals dropped almost immediately.
I still don’t realise the rationale behind hate for “here are 10 characters, but we’ll charge you for 8, and give you some stages and balance in the meantime”.
I guess some people don’t want a full roster and are happy with their vanilla game + w/e additional they want to pay for.
I certainly WOULD NOT have paid for stages, as would have been the case if stuff was DLC.
Is having the experience of a game different depending on whoever’s house you go to a great idea? I dunno, I guess everyone’s an internet monster nowadays - “I pay for whatever I want, no more, no less”.
They could have released individual DLC characters on a longitudinal basis. Would have probably earned them more money in the long run because folks would feel like the game is being ‘supported’.
Marvel pushing out licensed games using ‘best before dates’ is something that some folks also ignore.
If you were Capcom planning to release Ultimate in Spring 2012, but Marvel comes around and tells you that they’ll only allow it before the holidays, what would you do?
Hint: business men think to appease the books. If I’m gonna be at risk of losing my job regardless of the decision I make, I may as well choose the one that has a remote chance of being profitable than choose the path of guaranteed loss.
//all a fallacy. In my head.
May I ask how many of those new characters you have in rotation for your main team(s)? If it’s less than 8 then you paid 40 dollars for “X” new characters you actually use and some balance patches.
Two (Strider, Strange). My bro uses two others (Firebrand, Nemesis). Also both of us had our runs with Nova but dropped him. So that’s 5 in total.
Collectively we’ve tried using the rest but they simply didn’t fill the gap that was needed.
There’s no way of telling whether they’d be good replacements for our current teams until we tried though.
Sure you could Youtube and theory talk on threads, but I find the best way is to try them out myself. Looks at Wright, Rocket, Iron Fist.
Yes, it’s forcing characters you may not want down your throat, I agree. However…
By that avenue, AE was $15 for 4 characters and a balance patch. I don’t even use ANY of them. I paid for a balance patch because it mattered to my overly nerfed characters, and because competitive play required so. And for my casual friends to go “oh cool, Super Saiyan Oni and E. Ryu”. I almost regret getting AE because I have more fun with Marvel. The only saving grace is that my bro still gets mileage out of it as it’s still enjoyable for him.
This is my problem with Capcom fighters recently: They basically make you pay for patches and new characters at a “discounted” price. People argue that we’re getting a deal with 12 characters and patches for 40 bucks or 4 characters and patches for 15 bucks but there can be a massive balance overhaul for free (AE 2012) without the need to be bundled together with characters people don’t want or won’t/can’t play. We’re paying for patches and to learn matchups against these new characters that we ourselves won’t play.
Also, before someone counters with “Capcom has done this since the 90s, it’s nothing new”, that argument is not very smart. Back in the day we couldn’t hook our consoles up to the internet to get these fixes; We had no choice but to go out and buy these newer releases for their fixes and such but nowadays several characters can be changed within weeks of a release simply by going online, clicking “download” and waiting a few seconds/minutes.
These are a couple reasons I’ve yet to buy UMvC3 and probably won’t end up purchasing it. I’ve played it numerous times at tournaments and over my friends’ house and it doesn’t warrant a 40 dollar purchase on top of my initial 60 dollar purchase imo. I have to admit to being a bit surprised at the amount of units sold for this and that there wasn’t more of an uproar in the community past the initial announcement.
From a competitive point of view, if something new comes out, you buy it and move on.
From a casual point of view, yes you vote with your wallet; which a lot of people have. And you can see it in the Ultimate vs Vanilla sales.
Super SFIV was a much more fully-featured sequel for the same $40 compared to Ultimate. But then again, much of the new cast were poor until AE and perhaps even 2012. The casual gamer doesn’t see it this way, but there was enough on the plate for them to pick it up, especially since SF4 vanilla was getting a bit stale and a breath of fresh air certainly helped at a then ‘wow lower price’. Ultimate tried to do the same, but now had some lead-time bias in consumers making less impulse purchases, and the general AAA titles in a traditionally bad-for-fighters time of year.
You can tell it has made an effect on planning future games simply by requiring Ono reassuring the crowds that SFxT won’t have more bs re-releases, and everything will be DLC. Granted DLC costs Capcom to put on Live/PSN, but it quite simply may mean going the way of MK9 which did DLC right, which is not necessarily a bad thing (save for - did they ever fix the 360 issue of falling back on no patches if not connected to internet? if so, then great).
Oh, I completely understand the competitive standpoint but that doesn’t mean I have money to throw away on patches and I don’t think people should be so willing to accept things as they are. As things stand, if Capcom wanted they could charge 5-10 bucks for a complete balance patch and people would be up in arms initially but then they’ll just buy it and the FGC will just joke about it on forums, streams, etc…
SFxT is completely different beast with their DLC gems: This means either the entire FGC and tournament organizers are gonna have to buy all gems to stay current or they’ll have to limit the game to some degree. If it’s the former then Capcom won’t need a “Super SFxT” as they’ll make tons of money from, let’s say, 3-5 dollar gem packs.
I think one aspect that might’ve scared off casual players is things are just a lot stricter in Marvel 3. Mistakes of any kind often carry with them a heavy price.
Even for an experienced player, it can be unnerving seeing his character caught once, and then forced to watch as the opponent just wails on him in one giant 5 minute bullshit combo. I can only imagine the immense, controller-tossing frustration from a newbie’s perspective.
600k, eh? That’s actually really good for a sequel that came out 9 months after the original, and especially going up against heavyweights like Modern Warfare 3, Skyrim, etc. around the same time of release. Not too bad at all.
600k??? so…is that good or bad.
Can someone compare these sales to some other game that released at the same time like assassins creed, or skyrim???
Morrigan and Felicia both have extremely revealing outfits, so I really don’t think that’s an issue.
I’d really like to see this game get a balance patch out sometime down the line. Not to nerf the top tier characters, which everyone seems to want, but to help out the lower tier characters be more viable.
No use crying over spilled milk. Maybe they’ll get it right on the next go around.
The real problem right here. Hardcore folks don’t care about replays, better netcode, Megaman or online training mode so long as they can put the disc inside a console for tournaments, but the middle of the road folks and “casuals” care enough about things like those(and specific characters) to know when they are getting the short end of the stick. Almost anyone can look at SFIV’s/SFxT and see that the Mahvel games are not getting the treatment that a multi million unit seller deserves and a big number of folks are not going to tolerate it even if Capcom’s hands were tied.
It is an ugly situation between Capcom and Marvel that is leading to these problems. They should resolve this before Capcom ever considers an MvC4. They certainly can’t half ass it again with Megaman edition unless they really do want to make the series irrelevant in the eyes of the consumer.
The uproar was pretty big dude. GAF alone had arguments in threads that hit more than twenty thousand posts and we already know that the internet in general bitched up a storm.
Why would you compare sales between those games? It’s like comparing Rayman’s sales with those of MW3. Totally different genres, huge production/marketing budget differences and different public perception.
Again, past the initial announcement, within the months it cooled down greatly and people just went with it as the sales seems to indicate.
Okay, I’m a little confused. How are items shipped being compared to actual sales? I get where Capcom is coming from, since if they consider an item shipped to equal an item sold, then they must have already gotten the money for it from the retailers. But how does that equal an actual item sold? Say, for example, that they shipped 600,000 units, but only 100,000 units were sold to actual customers, leaving 500,000 units on store shelves and in warehouses. How would that not be considered a sales failure? If anything, that would make it an even more significant flop, since they overestimated its sales chances.
It’s a pretty fair question, especially since VGCharts (http://www.vgchartz.com/game/64624/ultimate-marvel-vs-capcom-3/) has them selling a small fraction of that number (yes, I know that the North American numbers are not included, but in order for the total to reach 600,000 units, NA would have to sell 12 times as many copies as the rest of the world combined, which seems… unlikely).
I’m not trying to be difficult, I think it’s a pretty fair question. Maybe someone has some insight that will help me out here.
If those 600k shipped do not sale, it will hurt them for the next game since there is a risk the command from retailler will be less.(Seth Killian said this in a interview, i’m not inventing stuff lol).
However, when you need to boost near the end of the fiscal year, it’s a good solution to look good in front of the invester.
Yeah, I get that, they need to make it look good for investors. But that’s not the same as a success, you know? It almost sounds like an excuse.
Look at the sales for other similar titles (MvC3 vanilla, SSF4, etc). About half of the sales came from North America, the other half came from the rest of the world. Going off the estimated 50k that Ultimate sold in the rest of the world, it makes sense to assume that around 100k were sold total. While Capcom may have made 600,000 copies of the game, it’s probable that less than a quarter of those were sold to actual customers. And that’s the real takeaway. I mean, that’s what we’re discussing, right?
Look, I don’t really have a horse in this race. If Capcom ultimately made money on the project, then they might just be happy with that (whether or not it was worth ruining a lot of goodwill with the non-hardcore crowd is another matter altogether…). If the retailers ate the cost, then they’ll likely be much more reluctant to strongly support the next version (which will make another version unlikely). And if the hardcore/tournament crowd is happy, then more power to them. The tournaments will be well-attended, the streams will be fun, and players can enjoy a good game. But, as far as the buying public is concerned, I don’t think we can call this game a success. If anything, I think it’d be fair to ultimately call it a failure.
Fighting games are a niche genre, it is not realistic to expect it to sell as well as a triple A game. I think it was received well, I have no trouble finding matches or lobbies. All I really hope for is that Ultimate made Capcom enough money to warrant future DLC.
I never said it was a success. It hurt capcom image to the retailers because of the unsold copy on shelve.
But capcom can flaunt the 600k number as much as it wants.
You might say “next capcom game, retailer will buy less” but next capcom game are RE licence wich always sell very well. And retailler wont be butthurt for that.
Capcom is doing to it’s hardcore loyal fanbase what nintendo did to it.
ignoring it to tend bigger markets.
i’m sad :/.
If there were a significant retail surplus, current rates would reflect that. Considering the nature of UMVC3 it’s $40 price point has held surprisingly steadfast since releae throughout the retail chains.
a) You must first acknowledge that vgchatz is a joke and nothing they post should be taken seriously
b) It’s a fact that this series is vastly more popular in NA than the rest of the world, so it selling 12 times as many copies in NA than the rest of the world isn’t unrealistic.