- 15,532
- Cairo, Egypt
- GTP_SEMS
But lots of other people didn't. Like... lots.
For the "better competition" argument to make sense, someone's got to be taking up the numbers that GT is losing.
FM4 and GT5 - broadly peers as they were on direct rival consoles and came out fairly close to each other (okay, 11 months) - sold pretty much 16m between them, with just under 8m of those being month 1 sales.
FM5 is 2.5m down on FM4. GT6 is 8m down on GT5. Where are the other games selling the 10.5m copies these two games have lost?
Driveclub accounts for 2m. PCARS for 1m. Where's the other 7m? Have they all gone to PC and bought iRacing and Assetto Corsa - only the online subscriber numbers don't reflect that (55k for iRacing!).
Perhaps they've ditched the sims and gone to arcade racers? They're not going to Need for Speed though - Rivals sold less than 5m since 2013, while back in 2005 NFS was selling that many copies on one console.
Sales aren't falling in Gran Turismo to be taken up by "better competition". Sales numbers are falling in racing games across the board and, it looks like, all games across the board.
Driveclub's 2 million sales figure is dated but point taken, FM5 is still a launch title (and wasn't a very good one to begin with) so it's sales are justified, PCARS didn't get much coverage so the average joe probably doesn't know this game exists, heck the average sim racing joe (me included) bought it used because of the bugs.
Still not sold on people buying racing games have decreased significantly, GT6 has several reasons to have sold these numbers and I'm sure GT7 will get things back on track if it's a decent game, also NFS this year will probably sell much better than the examples you've stated.