Mass Effect Sells A Million, Halo 3 Sells Five 69
Sales news is starting to trickle out for some of the big Fall games, with the Xbox 360 so far looking very strong. BioWare's Mass Effect has sold a million copies, while Bungie's blockbuster Halo 3 has already sold over five million copies since its September 25th release date. That last figure comes from a GameDaily interview with Xbox Marketing VP Jeff Bell. Aside from noting this week's release of Halo 3's first downloadable map pack, Bell also connected these sales back to the console itself: "The reaction has been very positive. In fact, we saw incredible sales of Xbox 360 for the week of November 18, including Black Friday of more than 310,000 Xbox 360 in the U.S. alone. This is really strong momentum for us given that we're already in our third year on the market."
bad article title (Score:5, Funny)
We sold five whole copies of Halo 3! Pop the boxed champaign!!
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Ironically, it looks that way in my dorm. When Halo 2 came out, 9 of the 10 Halo owners in my dorm bought it. Halo 3? 1 person. 1.
Ah well, I suppose that one of these days, I'll get me one of those new-fangled consoles. And immediately take it apart to see if I can't improve on the manufacturer's design.
Re:bad article title (Score:5, Insightful)
I did. The marriage ended badly. In the dorm, at least I get regular meals.
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And the profit is? (Score:2, Interesting)
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They already have.
They turned the profits from the sales of Halo 1 into "The Abomination" sometimes referred to as Halo 2.
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Re:And the profit is? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I don't see how they're going to do it. They bought Bungie just for the game that became Halo, but other studios, like Rare, have yet to produce anything resembling a hit. I think they're screwed. They're never going to recoup the initial investment.
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Gears of War 2, of course. How soon people forget how many zillions of copies that game sold.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader [wikipedia.org]
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Fight Night Round 3. (slowdown issues fixed from the 360 version). Oblivion... better framerates and much better load times...
Granted, most of EA's ports are half-assed, but the Burnout folks are saying a PS3 developed game (Burnout Paradise) makes the 360 _port_ better.
So, let me mention one thing... "graphically superior" is subjective. And since it is, you can stop trying to convince everyone your opinion is correct.
And as for poorly done ports... Call of Duty 4 looks awesome
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The 360 has always had good sales (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's clearly the best mover of games (please spare me Sport and Play since the opportunity for 3rd parties to have their games inlcuded with the console or a second remote is slim to none) based on sales.
Even when looking at games available on all systems, the 360 cleans up.
It was a great fall for the 360 considering the releases:
Halo, Guitar Hero 3, The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, Assassians Creed, Mass Effect, Rock Band, amongst other lesser titles.
That's a pretty impressive list for people that like "games". And what is being missed by some is that in those titles there's really some new things. Orange Box has Portal. AC took interactive environments to a new level letting you scale nearly every single building in the game. Rock band is rock band. Mass Effect introduced a new dialog system to the new standard for action-RPG's that let the game unfold like a movie.
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It's a console, not a fucking religion. I suppose you own an Apple iMac and iPod and iPhone and use iWork for everything in your iLife too - since Apple users are the most likely to make a religion out of a piece of equipment.
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Re:The 360 has always had good sales (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless of that, it was still an awesome game...fighting was intense, storyline was interesting, the choices were truly difficult at times, and the production values were sky high. Only the second game that I have started playing a second time as soon as I finished it (the first game I played back to back like that was Secret of Mana 2)
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I would have to disagree...uncovering some part of the game universe via the codex, going on varied side quests, and just simply discovering more of the main plotline kept it interesting for me from the start right up until the credits began to roll.
Except that all the sidequests are basically the same thing. So are all the guns and outfits. The enemies are generally morons. The MAKO vehicle is a pain. If it wasn't for the graphics, music and dialog, the game wouldn't be worth playing. It's just really lacking in the gameplay department.
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As far as general gam
Re:The 360 has always had good sales (Score:4, Informative)
But the thing I hated most about Oblivion was the impossibly wide scope of the world. It took too long to get anywhere initially, and it was too easy to get side-tracked. Seriously, in hour two of Oblivion I was being given quests on the complete opposite side of the game world, in the complete opposite direction from the main storyline. Why?? How does that add to the game?? Maybe it's just me, but it felt like the gameplay equivalent of waterboarding: here's a bucket full of choices, let's pour them all right up your nose. With Mass Effect, I can fully explore most uncharted jump points in about an hour, including exploring the planets, scanning everything, taking care of any side quests there, etc. Makes it a lot easier to just take bite-sized chunks of the game, and I never feel like I'm being drowned in choices.
Assassin's Creed has something similar with its viewpoint system. Each city is divided into quarters (well, thirds really, things like the Poor Quarter, the Merchant Quarter and the Rich Quarter). In each quarter are half a dozen or so tall vantage points which are premarked on your map. You can scale one of these towers and survey the area, which will put all mission objective in the vicinity of that tower on a map. While the cities are quite large and complex, you can easily break them down into smaller chunks, and clear out each chunk before moving on to the next one. Mass Effect uses the multiple layers of the galaxy map (Galaxy > Jump Node > System > Planet) to do the same thing. I think for a lot of gamers, this sort of thing is a really important feature to include in any game with a significant measure of openness and nonlinearity in the game world. Without it, people like me play the game for a couple hours, get overwhelmed with too many choices and not enough tools to track them, and then leave and never come back. I'd say it's a given that there will eventually be a PC port of Mass Effect, probably around the six month mark from Mass Effect's release. I'm sure enterprising PC users will find a way to tweak the game. There are certainly lots of issues that could use addressing (loading times, texture caching, the cover system, and oh god, the interface system), but I think it says a lot about the game that I am completely willing to tolerate its flaws in order to experience the core gameplay. Personally, the mod I'm looking forward to is called Mass Effect 2. If I were giving notes to Bioware, I'd say convince Microsoft to let you cache to disk on those systems that have a hard drive, make the cover system work like the one in RB6: Vegas, overhaul the inventory system, but otherwise just open up another 3rd of the galaxy for me to explore and fill it with new content.
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This should be on the back of Oblivon's box for advertising.
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Oh, and the close-ups look like ass. Everyone has been injected with copious amounts of botox, they have dead zombie eyes, and it just looks poor, unstylized and lazy, like something someone tossed together in Poser 4 about 10 years ago.
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I didn't like the way that enemies scaled in Oblivion, making me feel like I was really on a pointless levelling treadmill. I really felt a sense of growing more powerful with Mass Effect. Oblivion's story never really grabbed me, the Mass Effect story was a lot more interesting and well-told, for my money.
After playing for a couple of days, I truly despised Oblivion's level-scaling. We were not alone in that, as that was one of the first things that mods were created to fix. Well, that and the horrible xboxy interface. Mass Effect definitely does a better job of storytelling than Oblivion.
But the thing I hated most about Oblivion was the impossibly wide scope of the world. It took too long to get anywhere initially, and it was too easy to get side-tracked. Seriously, in hour two of Oblivion I was being given quests on the complete opposite side of the game world, in the complete opposite direction from the main storyline. Why?? How does that add to the game??
The world isn't very big in the game. In fact, that's been one of the big complaints that a lot of people have had, and there are several mods in the works that expand the size quite a bit, the equivalent of adding ne
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I like games (Score:2)
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No it doesn't. That's a matter of opinion. The XBox has very little genre coverage and suffers from pretty much the exact same problem the original XBox had. Very few unique games that aren't better on the PC.
Let's look at your list:
Halo - A mediocre single player fps, redeemed only by multiplayer.
Guitar Hero 3 - Can play it on a PS2, and everyone owns a PS2.
Orange Box - An inferior port of a PC title.
Call of Duty 4 - See Orange Box.
A
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No, and stop looking at "my list". You can crap on it all you want, but it doesn't mean you've got a good point. Sales show most people don't think like you.
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Then I put forth my opinion on the originality of the fall lineup. I ever clarified that when I noted that people aren't talking about the originality much. Learn to read dumbass. I even went so far as to briefly explain the parts of the game I thought were original.
Is two things in a reply too much for you to follow or something? Everyone else seemed to grasp it OK. Maybe ins
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Learn to fucking write. I don't see a SINGLE reply to you about sales. NOT ONE. In fact there are TWO comments about game quality, so evidentally I'm not alone in not "getting" that your post was about sales and not a value judgement on quality(I think it's pretty obvious my initial reply was a statement as to quality). This supposed legion of people who got what you meant apparently felt no nee
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"At least in the US and Europe. And it's enough, even with bad sales in Japan, to say it has good sales. So this is no surprise.
And it's clearly the best mover of games (please spare me Sport and Play since the opportunity for 3rd parties to have their games inlcuded with the console or a second remote is slim to none) based on sales"
So save your "you couldn't fucking understand I
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Your right
It's you're. Thanks for being a big man and admitting it though.
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Hell, you want a link. Sure. How about in the games section of
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GH3 - PS2 doesn't have online play or downloadable tracks.
Rock Band - again, PS2 (Wii version is not confirmed) version doesn't have online play or downloadable tracks... and that cuts a lot of the game out, because Rock Band's DLC is excellent.
Mass Effect - no one really cares if a game rips off another game, as long as it does it well. I haven't played Star Con
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Also, you should play star control 2. It's free [sourceforge.net] now. The plot/story elements are very similar to mass effect, gameplay is diff
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Re:Just how much of that 5mil in sales... (Score:5, Informative)
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In theory the people that track and publish sales -can- also track returns / exchanges, but don't reliably. its twice as much work, and its usually just statistical noise anyways.
Unless there is a systemic problem... like rrods, or halo3 scratch
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Irrelevant. If I take the disc back to the store to exchange it, and the store exchanges it with regular stock, it may count as a sale.
unless the store is stupid enough to eat the cost (which I know the one I work at isn't),
Why would they eat the cost? Of course they'll still send in a claim for replacement discs to microsoft.
Then none of the damaged disc returns are included in the numbers
Depends entirely how 'the numbers' are computed.
If the st
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Halo is an exclusive, so all the sales will be on one platform, while a game like madden gets its sales split up between 4 platforms.
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Re:Astroturfing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are there more iPod stories then Zen stories? Hmmm, not hard to figure out.