In a
recent interview with Siliconera about the overall performance of last year's action-adventure title
Enslaved, Namco Bandai Vice President of Marketing Carlson Choi mentioned that the game didn't sell as well as the company had hoped it would. He does go on to say something very interesting about Enslaved, though:
"To answer that question of the challenge of the unit number it really didn’t do what we anticipated. To be perfectly frank, I think as a company prior to us reforming this organization, going to market, I think the game went to market at a very busy season. It launched in the midst of a busy holiday season. Last year, there were like 4000+ games for consoles. We didn’t do a good job finding the right time for it because when you look at the quality of the game it speaks for itself."
Choi's observation is a valid one.
On the same day that Enslaved was released, the game had major competition from two established IPs in
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and
NBA 2K11. Even though
Enslaved was generally well-received by critics, the game was passed over because there were more familiar options at retail at the time. It's an unfortunate by-product of the video game industry's love affair with overloading their releases for the holiday season every year.
Enslaved isn't the only game that suffered from being lumped in with too many releases at once. Arcade racing title
Split/Second had absolutely no chance of success when it debuted in May of last year, despite being outside of the holiday release window. Why? Three words:
Red Dead Redemption.
Split/Second's sales potential was further diminished when
Activision released its own arcade racing game in
Blur during that same month. The fallout from the poor sales performance for both arcade racers was devastating as
Activision recently shuttered
Blur developers
Bizarre Creations and the fate of
Split/Second developers
Black Rock Studios is still in doubt with
Disney Interactive's recent restructuring.
March has the potential to do similar damage.
THQ adjusted its launch date of
Homefront to avoid competing against
Dragon Age II and this year's crop of baseball games, and now release a week before
Crysis 2. Can two first-person shooters sell well within a week of each other, given that there is so much other competition in other genres out there? Baseball, tennis, golf, and wrestling games all hit in March for sports fans.
Dynasty Warriors 7 hits in March, but so does
Warriors: Legends of Troy... and both games could cancel each other out.
We will see if
Namco learns its lesson... and it's one that the rest of industry should pay attention to, as well.
Source:
Siliconera
