There's a concept called 'legs' in movie sales, and the same can be applied to games.
Yes, most every game has more sales initially, but how steep that drop off is gives a strong indication as to player satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and how supportive or damaging this release is to the brand.
Just because there is nearly always a drop-off, doesn't mean that we can't look at the trend and draw some conclusions. Yes games are a bit different with their capacity to offer an ongoing expierience, go on discount, and to be updated later, but we can still attempt to compare like-for-like. Pick some other similar single player story driven game titles, sequels to another, and see how much they relatively dropped off. The question isn't whether it dropped off, most games will. The question is if it dropped off harder than should be expected, because word of mouth killed any hype.
We know it was a flop relative to its budget. We can be fairly sure it's a flop given its effect on the brand and future releases (similar to how star wars 8 harmed star wars 9 and solo). I think it's very plausible that it further flopped with a steeper-than-expected drop off in sales, but haven't looked into that specifically.
80% drop off up on the higher end of drop-off for sure. It's another sign in favour of it being a 'flop'. They generally expect 50-70% drop off. Now you can justify that with 'heavily pre-ordered titles' being an exception. And that does make some logical sense. But if word of mouth was good, there would have been less drop off.
There's a concept called 'legs' in movie sales, and the same can be applied to games.
Yes, most every game has more sales initially, but how steep that drop off is gives a strong indication as to player satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and how supportive or damaging this release is to the brand.
Just because there is nearly always a drop-off, doesn't mean that we can't look at the trend and draw some conclusions. Yes games are a bit different with their capacity to offer an ongoing expierience, go on discount, and to be updated later, but we can still attempt to compare like-for-like. Pick some other similar single player story driven game titles, sequels to another, and see how much they relatively dropped off. The question isn't whether it dropped off, most games will. The question is if it dropped off harder than should be expected, because word of mouth killed any hype.
We know it was a flop relative to its budget. We can be fairly sure it's a flop given its effect on the brand and future releases (similar to how star wars 8 harmed star wars 9 and solo). I think it's very plausible that it further flopped with a steeper-than-expected drop off in sales, but haven't looked into that specifically.
https://twitter.com/Chris_Dring/status/1340709772799209473
80% drop off up on the higher end of drop-off for sure. It's another sign in favour of it being a 'flop'. They generally expect 50-70% drop off. Now you can justify that with 'heavily pre-ordered titles' being an exception. And that does make some logical sense. But if word of mouth was good, there would have been less drop off.