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Why does everyone assume Read Dead Redemption 2 is a guaranteed to have massive sales?
- Thread starter ToddBonzalez
- Start date
Yeah, I can't say I disagree with any of that, I just don't think Bioshock is the right (or even a fair) point of comparison. Completely different contexts, y'know?
Regardless, I think there will be a healthy number of folks proselytising RDR2 and - what with all the systemic hijinks possible - likely a healthy Twitch/YouTube community. It'll be enough to make a lot of GTA fans curious enough to look into it. It'll never match GTA (and I think R* knows that), but I reckon that will still translate to substantial earlyish sales.
Whether R* manage to retain the GTA fans, given the slower pace and generally narrower, more niche focus, I can't say for sure, but RDO will be the make or break of that no doubt.
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It's purely anecdotal but my friends don't play many games at all (fifa, gta, etc), but they're all locked in for red dead because of gta 5 and the rockstar name. The setting seems almost inconsequential to them, it's just a huge thing and they want to play it.
That is interesting. R* releases are events these days. They even bother the mainstream press.
You forgot "+ Multiplayer" :)
I did, and even his reasoning later in the thread didn't justify the initial comment he made in the original post. Citing Bioshock Inifinite as an example of a game that didn't have "massive sales" despite selling 11 million copies, and then having to justify the comment based on correlation of events, rumor and innuendo and no actual numbers to compare further down the thread is going to raise questions.
Whether a game sold a lot of copies, it made a lot of profit or hit the publisher's sales forecast are all different conversations, and achieving one doesn't mean the game achieved the other two. Sales targets have more to do with investments, share holders and stock prices than anything else. You can look no further than the famous story about Tomb Raider 2013 selling 3.4 million copies the first month of its release and it not meeting Square-Enix sales expectations for that fiscal year. Selling 3.4 million copies of a game in 2013 in one month or even a year strikes me as a lot of sales. It not hitting S-E's unrealistic sales targets is not the same conversation.
EDIT: On the subject of RDR2 and its hype machine, I think people are forgetting that every trailer release garnered millions of views, generated tons of discussion beyond just your hardcore sites like GAF and RE, and the anticipation for this has been building since last year, when the game was originally supposed to release. We're also ignoring how every AAA publisher moved their big release to get away fromthis game, a move typically reserved for Call of Duty, and even then EA and Ubisoft would still drop their big titles in the same 2 week window. So it seems to me that even the people in the industry believe this is going to be gigantic.
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They are two different conversations. The most important difference is that one matters and the other is completely meaningless.
"This game sold a lot of copies regardless of its budget and expectations." Uh ... OK. Who does this matter to? Maybe people on message boards care, but they shouldn't. Talking about a number without putting it into context is a waste of time. It would be like saying, "I reached a velocity of 1,037 mph!" But I left out whether this was a drag race or on a plane or something else. 1,037 mph is always fast? I don't think you would feel that way if you realized I was talking about the speed I reached while standing still as the Earth rotates on its axis.
If the point that everyone is making is, "NO! 3.4 million is always a big number! 15 million is always a big number!" then I think we are communicating in a fundamentally different way.
My point is that a sales number is only big if the people who spent the money getting that number think it's big. That's the relevant context.
Jesus lol. I'm not saying it won't be successful. But everyone's take is resting on anecdotal evidence, mine included. For every person who's saying "I spoke to 10 people and all of them know about Rockstar" there's another saying the exact opposite.
The game will no doubt be successful for sure and will easily cross the 20 mil mark in units sold. I'm not refuting that. I'm just saying that Red Dead and Rockstar as brands are nowhere near as ubiquitous as Grand Theft Auto is. People who don't play video games know what GTA is. My grandmother knows what GTA is, but I can't say the same for Red Dead.
Yeah, I honestly don't understand how people can even question this.
It's Rockstar's first current gen open world game...they happen to be the undisputed leader in single player open world games, which are maybe the most popular genre of single player games...and will likely have the most advertising and marketing of any single player game this gen. Also, the fact that there has only been one prior Red Dead game.
Rockstar releases a new game like twice a decade? Of course this is on everyone's radar.
Word is that it's going to be a MASSIVE ad campaign, which as someone pointed out to me is "Rockstar being Rockstar."
Oh hey. Apparently common sense was right again.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/re...ggest-opening-weekend-of-all-time-725m.77843/
Seems like it outsold Bioshock Infinite's LTD in three days, and even by the relative size of the production it's going to make a hefty profit.
Game's budget was likely $300m~, and if the first three days had a sell-through that brought $765m then well damn, we have the the holidays, traditional long legs of R* games as well as Online coming up.
Rockstar getting a 40% cut of that would already recoup development cost from just the opening three days.
Game has sold well. To the surprise of no one*.
*except the people who believe it wouldn't, the moon landing was fake, and we're living in a simulation.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/re...ggest-opening-weekend-of-all-time-725m.77843/
Seems like it outsold Bioshock Infinite's LTD in three days, and even by the relative size of the production it's going to make a hefty profit.
Game's budget was likely $300m~, and if the first three days had a sell-through that brought $765m then well damn, we have the the holidays, traditional long legs of R* games as well as Online coming up.
Rockstar getting a 40% cut of that would already recoup development cost from just the opening three days.
Game has sold well. To the surprise of no one*.
*except the people who believe it wouldn't, the moon landing was fake, and we're living in a simulation.
That's virtually impossible due to GTAO. But it was always gonna do very well.
Yes that much was obvious, I don't think anyone said otherwise
Nope. OP never said GTA big. He said "massive sales".
Would you agree that RDR2 has massive sales?
This was a dumb thread, and anyone who doubled down with OP deserves all the crow people wanna come in here and serve.
If people moving their games to another fucking quarter didn't tip you off, it should have.
If people moving their games to another fucking quarter didn't tip you off, it should have.
Between the 98 metascore and the $725 million in the bank, it's almost like the entirety of the hate for this game exists in a tiny bubble on a niche hobbyist website.
Dagger lol
Edit: just realized this is another niche-man situation. For the record I got no hate for the OP and don't particularly care. Just found the comment I quoted funny. :)
Yeah I was referring to the widespread negatively toward the game I've seen in other threads. Please don't take my post as an attack OP, I think your original post was actually fairly measured and sensible, if a bit misguided.
It has been divisive pretty much everywhere besides the reviews where oddly enough its a 10/10 game almost everywhere.
You mean the coverage of the labor issues? I admit that got more attention that I expected, even my brother who didn't follow games super closely asked me about it.
I dunno, the only good Lemoyne raider is a dead Lemoyne raider.