It clearly exceeded their expectations on the sales front. You have to be realistic and if you look in context, GT5 did an amazing job regarding sales.
Citation required.
How do you know it clearly exceeded their expectations? Do you have a link to PD/Sony internal sales targets for GT5 that you could provide us with?
Given that I seriously doubt you do the only thing we have to work with is what we know, development costs are going up across the board and sales are down.
That is happening for all the top franchises regarding expenditure. Look at GTA series for example. Sold less so far but development costs must have skyrocketed compared to PS2 days. GT is still number one selling Sony owned IP, it hits big numbers for every game released so far.
GTA IV is the second highest selling GTA title in the series (2.5 million behind GTA:SA), however it also has received far less critical praise than its for-bearers and many are saying that they need to turn it around in GTAV unless it wishes to loose ground to the competition.
Well GT3 did do exceptionally well in NA compared to any other in the series, I wonder why...
Sales for a single market count why?
It has been far from problematic, I think a lot of developers would love to have PDIs problems. Many well known development teams have been closed down this generation. This generation of consoles is also not over with yet, so we can potentially see a new GT game.
You honestly don't think that GT5's development and life has been problematic? Explain how exactly, because if they were not backed by Sony money I'm pretty sure they would not be sitting quite so comfortably.
GT3 sold over 5.5million extra units by the way, not just 4 so don't know why you keep on saying 4 million.
GT5 is still selling, so might get closer to GT4 and go ahead of GT2. Anyway quite impressive when you consider how dominant the PS2 was compared to PS3 now is regarding market share and number of consoles sold.
I was using conservative figures, but thanks for proving my point to a greater degree. You also keep using teh final sales figures for the PS2 rather than the actual figures at this stage in its life, which were not as massively different as you keep trying to make out. The simple fact is that with only one full title so far this gen PD are well behind the past generations in terms of units shifted.
I don't think shareholders view things in such a small scope, if they are that worried by what a bad job PDI are doing then I think we would see Kaz in less control now. I think Sony are quite happy with how well GT is doing as a franchise given how much of a struggle it has been for a number of their other development studios.
Shareholder work in many ways and given that drops in sales figures do cause company stock to drop (Square just got hit that way after a number of titles failed to hit projected sales targets), so I would not be quite so sure on that. Kaz is already divided between PD and his seat on the Sony board and one could argue that PD gets 'protected' to some degree by that fact, how long that may continue is another matter.
There is probably a lot more people more optimistic than me regarding next GT game. Next GT game would show us where PDI really are. There has been a lot of suggestions sent to PDI about GT. I think there is probably a number of people who want to see GT fail on here, but given the amount of fans feedback as well as getting a GT Academy Winner helping out on physics and stuff like that, I think I can be optimistic. They also already have done the base and with a bigger development team now working on evolving that, it could improve in big steps quite quickly.
PS4 success is more important to GT series future I think than some people who are going to jump ship. If Sony capture more people from the other side, then I think for a flagship franchise, it will mean more sales than a few people moving to a console brand that is in decline. Will have to wait a while to see how well the new systems do first however, but there is a lot of negativity around Microsoft's next console and that might be in a similar context to the next GT game to some people without knowing much about it. Both could do a good job to convince people who have gone off console / franchise to want it again. Might find out a lot more about console gaming future soon as next month.
Who on here
wants PD to fail? You (and a few others) seem to be under the odd impression that if someone is critical of a title they want it gone, nothing could be further from the truth and from a personal point of view I want them to get in right next time around. I simply lack confidence in that based on the way the series has progressed, most frustratingly as GT:5P was a step in the right direction, but the full release then seemed to take a large stumble backwards.
I would respectfully argue a few points to the above data, Scaff.
1. The PS2 included 2 major titles when the GT series had a huge following whereas the PS3 has only had 1 major title.
2. The price point for these games were much lower for the PS2 and with the economy struggling, it is conceivable that it has accounted for a small and significant (material) loss in sales for the PS3. This would be either because people cannot afford the game, or are price pointed out of the console.
3. The amount of time lapsed is immense on GT3 (12 years) and large on GT4 (8 years) in a gaming sense. PS2 titles are still being sold as new so it can continue to build, albeit at an extremely slow rate. We see folks even within our community seeking titles from the PS2 today. (As an aside, I wonder if these sales figures includes used title sales at major retail outlets, but I suspect not). Sales per title per elapsed year builds a different argument.
I would say two titles at 25 million, 12.5 million per title over 6 years (conservatively) would not exceed one title at 9 million over the last 2.5 years in a down-turned economy.
- That's why I posted and linked to figures for both titles and gens. However its a moot point, sales this gen of GT titles are the lowest of any gen to date and that is rather a big deal, after all no one but PD is to blame for the fact we only have one GT title this gen.
- I paid as much at retail for GT3 and GT4 as I did for GT5, so I'm not sure exactly what the point your making is, and comparatively £40 now is worth a lot less than back when GT3/GT4 came out.
- Copies of GT3 and 4 that are still floating around are either old stock or second hand, pressing of them as new titles is not ongoing and the tail of products like this drops massively, the vast majority of sales (90%+) are going to be occurring within the first 2 to 3 years of the title, which still puts GT5 behind and to be honest it not going to catch up either.
I agree that if GT6 is not seen or perceived as a better title, the series could be looking on a downward trend as the casual or marginal fan will move away and the die-hard fan (including myself) may start losing faith or interest.
Some of us already have, despite how a number of members here like to paint some of us, what they seem to forget (or ignore) is that many of us have invested more time in the series than the majority of members here. We are not simply coming to moan because we dislike GT, quite the opposite. I've bought every GT title (and I mean every prologues, concepts, etc.) at launch, the GT series has sold two Sony consoles to me on launch day, I have invested thousands of hours in the series (take a look at the tuning guides linked in my sig and tell me once you have read them that I've not invested in GT).
An increasing number of the diehard fans are not maybe going to loose faith, they already have, and PD would be wise to take that on-board.
Sony have with regard to the Playstation brand, looking at the mistakes they made with the PS3 (which I still love - but you would have to be foolish to not see the problems they had) and resolving those with the PS4 (so news to date would suggest). Now compare that to Nintendo, the Wii was a huge seller and they seem to have got complacent and simply released what they want in the Wii U, problem is that they seem to have forgotten to check if it was actually what the audience were after and now sales (and as a result profit wise) they are looking to be in deep trouble. That's how quickly it can potentially change.
I want PD to be in the former camp, but I fear right now they may be headed to the latter camp.
GT5 is most likely one of the highest profitable games this generation.
Citation required in a huge way.
I see your point about the reviews and to be honest, I don't much care for critics and rarely do they influence my decisions.
It's obvious that millions of others don't depend on critics either.
Pity then that shareholders do, company stock regularly rise and fall on the back of Metacritic results, companies would have to be suicidal to ignore them.
If you want to take that route, you must realize that NOTHING is guaranteed. Now while I believe that GT as a series needs to be careful for the next game, they are in much better shape then most developers.
Because they are Sony owned and that nothing is guaranteed is the exact point I am making.
I believe GT6 will do fine on the sales front and that is because 9 million purchases is significantly higher then pretty much everything. Even if GT6 sold half as much, it would still be better than most if not all sim racing games.
The sales figures in isolation are stupidly high for a sim (I've said anything different) however they will never be viewed in isolation will they, not by the critics, the public and most importantly by Sony and its shareholders.
So you say. Going by that logic, you might as well as say any studio that has a game that sells less 5 million copies is doomed. What about those games that sell only 1 million copies?
That would be your logic not mine, as I never said anything even close. What I have said is that any series in which sales are consistently declining will eventually find itself in trouble, but kudos to you for actually ignoring the real point.
