albino boo said:
Its called the economics. In case you haven't noticed we are in the worst recession in 80 years. Southern Europe has unemployment rates of around 50% of the under 25s and and over 25% overall. Thats is a significant chunk of the market where people just simply can't afford games anymore. The French and even the Dutch economy is on the verge of being dragged into the same state as the south of the eurozone. Outside of the eurozone real incomes have been squeezed by inflation since 2008 and less disposable income means less games sold.
The decisions to start on the current crop of AAA games would have been taken back in 2010 when the market was still buoyant and economic projections indicated moderate growth, so it was not an unreasonable assumption that sales growth would continue. The problem lies in that the economic projections were based on the assumption that the Eurozone's problems would be solved, however that is something that Eurozone leaders have singularly failed to do. A major part of the world economy has still not tackled the problems facing it and the consequent lack of demand is imposing drag on the rest of the world economy. In short games sales figures will continue to drop until the Eurozone is fixed and that is way beyond the remit of games companies.
I'm fully aware of all of that, but you've only proven my point (I was being facetious). Despite everything you just said, 3.7 million people were still able to come up with the disposable income to purchase this game. Based on everything we've learned until recently, that should be a very high number that causes the champagne to come out. What I was getting at was the issue with that number being low despite all factors or context, and 1.2 billion being a number where you aren't turning a profit. My only guess is that Levine asks for crazy Bioshock money, and Houser asks for insane GTA money, to the point where our normal standards of success are greatly skewed. Things should be going great for them
considering the economic situation.
And if the economy is hurting them that badly despite all that, the teams really don't need to do all their assets from scratch, write an in-house lighting engine from scratch, or pay Hollywood voice actors. That's not the kind of shit that makes games memorable, and I imagine the sales would be damn near the same if that were the case.