Sony’s PlayStation 5 killer app (personally, I think Demon’s Souls is the true killer app), Spider Man: Miles Morales, flunked at the box office with only 600,000 units moved during the launch period. The number is staggeringly low when you factor in that it launched across both the PS4 (with its nearly 115 million unit installed base), and the PS5 (3.7 million consoles sold so far).
Miles Morales, wasn’t expected to perform as strongly as the previous Spider Man entry. There were several reasons for this. There is a perception that Miles Morales is simply nothing more than an over marketed DLC, and not a full length epic adventure. Its short running time seemed to confirm that perception of the game.
Then there is also the issue of the game featuring an expanded universe character as Spider Man, and not Peter Parker. Perhaps, the most important factor that has kept the game from being a commercial success is that Miles Morales has been marketed, primordially, as a PlayStation 5 showcase – even though the game is cross generation – and while there are 3.7 million PS5s around, only God knows how many of them are in scalper warehouses.
Miles Morales is a very good game, and hopefully the low sales do not discourage Sony from continuing Miles’ saga in future games
Cyberpunk 2077 Sells 13 Million Units Bugs be Damned
Sometimes a game is too big to fail, and even though CD Projekt’s stock has taken massive hits over the past few weeks, the Cyberpunk 2077 remains a supremely strong seller for the company. Cyberpunk 2077 is a mess right now, at least on consoles. The game is unplayable by most modern standards on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is somewhat bearable (if you don’t mind missing textures, poor frame-rate, crashes and broken AI) on the premium PS4 Pro, and Xbox One X.
The PS5, and Xbox Series X seem to run the game in much better shape, but it remains a subpar experience when compared to every other open world effort that is available on the systems. That hasn’t stopped sales, most of which I have to assume are coming in from the PC and Xbox front, as Sony pulled the game out of their store, and many console gamers are asking for refunds.
Still, the strong sales show that not everything is over for CD Projekt – so yes, there will be a Witcher 4 – and the growing strength of western RPG games in general. The situation also sends a strange message that no matter how broken a game is, as long as the hype and marketing muscle is there, the game will recoup costs.
It is strange, but yes, Cyberpunk was too hyped up to fail, it recouped its massive development and marketing budget on pre-orders alone (8 million). The worry here is that publishers and developers might start making incredible promises, and showing impossible trailers in order to snatch pre-orders even if the final product falls short – in this case very short – of the promised experience.
Of course, the flip side is that it is unlikely CD Projekt would have survived the fallout of Cyberpunk 2077’s unfinished state if the game hadn’t sold extraordinarily high numbers, So, it is likely that other publishers are taking notice of CD Projekt’s blunder, and perhaps the trend of launching incomplete products will diminish in the coming years.
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