Selling like hotcakes

BioSnark · 2011-04-28 14:21:00 UTC

It was for a while when the prerelease purchase became available.

Hansi · 2011-04-28 14:40:49 UTC

[QUOTE=Mustkunstn1k;285169]Yeah. I can’t understand why Steam isn’t featuring it on the big box. I really hope that they put it there a week before release.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe Valve consider Brink as a too big concurrence for their own games, specially for TF2?

dommafia · 2011-04-28 15:49:09 UTC

highly unlikely tbh.

Trane · 2011-04-28 20:15:42 UTC

I wouldn’t worry too much about Brink getting advertised on steam. Brink should be high profile enough to get placed in the scrolling ad banner closer to release. Plus it’ll probably get one of those massive, damn near full screen, banners on release day due to it being a steamworks title. Valve does a good job promoting games using steamworks (hell, Supreme Commander 2 got one). There’s no doubt in my mind that Brink will recieve the same treatment.

Mustkunstn1k · 2011-04-28 20:17:03 UTC

I have read how developers / publishers say that Valve does pull stunts like these… but they have supported other games that have the same thing, so I don’t see why Brink.

CoFran · 2011-04-28 20:58:46 UTC

I wouldve thought they would sell ads spots and not place them based on general popularity, I don’t see why they wouldnt… ?

Coolaguy · 2011-04-28 22:13:29 UTC

Update #2: Brink seems to have achieved roughly 332,000 pre-order units sold. As expected, this performance exceeded the earlier linear trend prediction that I had made (i.e. 300,000 pre-order units sold). [Source] I look forward to seeing how the first week unit sales hold up.

Update #1: I’d say that Brink is still on track for 300,000 pre-order units sold. However, the Xbox 360 underperformed the linear trend by ~5,000 and the PS3 made up the losses with greater-than-expected gains. [Source 1] [Source 2]

I find this thread topic interesting, and I began to wonder about the same thing upon checking it out.

What Does It Mean To “Sell Like Hot Cakes” for a Software Developer (Such as Splash Damage)?

I thought I’d try to put Brink’s pre-order numbers into perspective.

Brink has already secured ~220,000 pre-order unit sales for combined consoles (excluding PC) in the Americas region, with two weeks to go before release. (i.e. 175,000 for Xbox 360 and 50,000 for PS3) [Source]

Assuming a linear trend (which is usually an underestimate, based on the exponential growth curves for pre-orders that I have observed, especially in the final week), that means that Brink is on track for 300,000 pre-order unit sales on consoles. (i.e. 250,000 for Xbox 360 and 50,000 for PS3)

To put the 250,000 Xbox 360 pre-order figure (for the Americas) in perspective, that already ranks Brink in the Top 50 pre-order unit sales figures compared to the 2009-2010 period, albeit somewhere near the bottom.

Brink is a Triple-A title, so these unit sales are probably expected, new intellectual property notwithstanding. Nonetheless, the numbers are encouraging.

Comparing Brink’s Xbox 360 pre-orders unit sales to those of popular recent releases, Brink outperforms the following titles (in the Americas region) by virtue of pre-orders alone:

Pre-Order (unit sales) (NOT actual First-Week Launch unit sales)
Mortal Kombat (Xbox 360) - 193,000 units
SOCOM 4 - 184,000 units
Portal 2 (Xbox 360) - 213,000 units
Homefront - 80,000 units
Killzone 3 - 149,000 units
Bulletstorm - 114,000 units
Dead Space 2 (Xbox 360) - 180,000 units

Using pre-order figures, one can successfully forecast the first-week of launch unit sales. However, this next step is a little trickier. In order to forecast the actual first-week launch unit sales, one must factor in the extent that the audience is ‘Hardcore’ versus ‘Casual’ (among other factors… some of which are difficult to anticipate i.e. critical reception).

‘Casual’ titles tend to have post-launch first-week unit sales figure roughly 2x (or more) that of pre-orders, whereas more ‘Hardcore’ titles tend to range from roughly 1x to 1.5x those of pre-orders (the more ‘Hardcore’ the title [and the more appealing or imperative the pre-order bonuses themselves], then the lower the multiplier i.e. suppose the only way to play the game was as a Hardcore gamer with mount armour… then everyone who decided to purchase the game would need to buy the special edition in order to play…).

I don’t know exactly where Brink would rank on the ‘Hardcore’ to ‘Casual’ scale, given that the core gameplay seems rather Hardcore but that numerous efforts have been made to appeal to a wider (and hence, more Casual) audience (i.e. SMART, Mingleplayer, VOIP default off, FF default off, the Objective Wheel, the extensive character appearance customization, etc.)

For the sake of argument, I’m going to score Brink towards the most Hardcore end of the spectrum, given Splash Damage’s lineage of Hardcore shooters and the apparent complexity of the objective-based gameplay.

Thus,
Brink’s multiplier: 1.25x (forecast by me)

Therefore, I would forecast Brink’s Xbox 360 unit sales in the America region as roughly 300,000 with a combined console unit sales in the Americas of roughly 375,000 in the first week post-launch.

In many instances* a game’s first week post-launch sales consist of roughly one quarter to slightly less than half of the sales made in the intial year-long period.

That is (roughly),
(Entire Sales Volume for the Year) ~= (First Week Unit Sales)(2x to 4x multiplier)

where the first annual sales volume is a pretty accurate predictor of the commercial lifecycle success of the title.

* - New IPs tend to be excepted from this generalization, because, among other things, the rate of adoption isn’t as rapid owing to the rate that information gets spread about a new critically well-received property. Likewise, “Game of the Year” releases and DLC can greatly extend a new property’s life cycle and net sales. Of course, new IPs are also inherently far more risky, so they are also subject to a far more dramatic risk of financial failure. Unfortunately, for developers of new properties, there isn’t really a ‘baseline’ that one could expect in terms of sales from the launch of a new property.

If we were to apply a 2x multiplier to Brink’s forecast first-week unit sales, then we are talking about roughly 750,000 unit sales on consoles in the first year.

I think that these estimates have been relatively conservative based on what we presently know (i.e. Brink’s strong pre-order performance). By contrast, a 3.24x multiplier to Brink’s forecast first-week unit sales would give 1,000,000 unit sales for the Xbox 360, and that would place Brink in 2011’s predicted Top 50 best selling games in the Americas region.

If we compare Brink’s release to that of other novel intellectual properties, we can see that games like Bioshock (2.35x), Left 4 Dead (6.34x), Borderlands (5.80x), and Red Dead Redemption (3.5x) had higher multipliers applied to their first-week unit sales figures in realizing their first annual unit sales numbers. Each franchise represents a new intellectual property that has subsequently sold even more units as “Game of the Year” editions and additional content like DLC have been release to extend the product lifecycle.

Based on the conservative nature of my forecasts and estimates (i.e. extrapolatations using from known pre-order information and the trends observed in actual sales data across other titles), Brink is set to realize first week unit sales figures that will be commercially respectable, likely to exceed 375,000 units sold on consoles in the first week.

riptide · 2011-04-28 22:20:45 UTC

[QUOTE=Coolaguy;285512]I find this thread topic interesting, and I began to wonder about the same thing upon checking it out.