Critics have voiced their opinions on the best and worst games of the crucial 2014 holiday season, but which titles resonated most with consumers?
Sales data remains perhaps the best measure of a game’s ultimate success with players. Unfortunately, finding accurate worldwide sales figures for games has never been easy, and the steady rise in digital sales – which by and large aren’t accounted for in market research reports – is making it even harder to get a handle on the commercial success of individual titles.
Online industry research outfit VGChartz collates data from a variety of sources – mostly retail sales reports and data released by publishers – in its attempt to place a sales number beside popular games, but it, too, is hampered by the difficulty inherent in tracking digital sales.
Still, in a quest to determine how games are faring from a global perspective there aren’t many other places to turn. For consistency, all of the numbers in this story come from VGChartz data as of January 7, 2014.
Without a proper accounting of digital sales its safe to presume that actual sales are somewhat higher than the numbers reported on VGChartz. However, if we assume that most major games released at retail do the bulk of their business in stores, and that, at least in general, they share a similar percentage of online sales, we can perhaps at least get a handle on how they compare with one another.
To that end, according to VGChartz’ data, Call of Duty was once again the best selling game of the holiday season, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare notching 15.3 million copies in the sold column.
This number continues the military shooter franchise’s downward trend compared to previous instalments (some of which have sold nearly 30 million units in total, with the bulk of their sales coming in their first month), but it’s still a win for Activision.
And while Call of Duty may be gradually flagging, Activision has a new bona fide hit franchise in Bungie’s sci-fi shooter Destiny, which VGChartz is tracking at 9.3 million total copies sold so far. Given that Activision reported in excess of 13 million unique players as of Christmas (and the fact that Sony gives the game permanent and prominent placement in its online storefront), we can assume that literally millions of additional copies were sold digitally.
But the number two spot in the fall race was captured by EA’s FIFA 15, which VGChartz currently has pegged at 14.3 million copies sold globally. It’s far and away the best-selling sports game of the season. Next closest is Madden NFL 15 at 5 million, followed by NBA 2K15 at 3.7 million.
Car games (frequently lumped in with sports games) didn’t fare very well this fall: Ubisoft’s open-world racer The Crew, Sony’s social racer Driveclub, and Microsoft’s Forza Horizon 2 have each barely manage to cross the million mark, which compares poorly to previous driving hits like Gran Turismo 5, which passed 10 million.
One of the best selling games of the fall was actually a port of a last generation game to current hardware: Grand Theft Auto V. The enhanced version of Rockstar’s crime saga for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 has sold 6.5 million copies so far and is still sitting near the top of VGChartz’ weekly sales charts.
Another old game found new life over the holidays, too: Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. These Nintendo 3DS remakes of a pair of Game Boy Advance games have moved a combined 6.5 million copies to date.
Nintendo’s other fall offerings met with mixed success. Super Smash Bros. for 3DS moved a healthy 5 million copies, while the Wii U edition sold 2.35 million units (which means more than a quarter of the 8.5 million people who own a Wii U bought one). It’s apparently still selling strong.
However, the excellent Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (one of Post Arcade’s favourite games of the year) has apparently sold only a quarter of a million copies, the long awaited adult action game Bayonetta 2 hit just the half-million mark, and the Zelda-themed hack-and-slasher Hyrule Warriors only crossed the three-quarter million threshold.
Platform exclusives in general didn’t fare very well over the holidays. Microsoft’s massive (and massively bungled) Halo: The Master Chief Collection is sitting at just 1.7 million units, and Sunset Overdrive – a gamble on a niche new intellectual property from Insomniac Games – currently sits at 0.7 million copies sold, according to VGChartz.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity, also beleaguered by technical problems, has sold only 4.8 million copies to date. That number might not seem too bad, but it’s less than half the nearly 12 million copies sold by 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (though keep in mind 2014’s game launched only for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, skipping previous generation consoles entirely).
However, the French publisher can chalk up a win with Far Cry 4, which has reached the 4.5 million mark and is still selling well. It should eventually end up coming close to matching its immediate predecessor’s stellar sales of around 7 million.
A surprise hit came from Warner Bros.’ open-world action game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which told an original tale in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy universe and sold 3.5 million copies. Ditto for The Evil Within, a fresh horror IP from Bethesda Softworks and Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami that is approaching the 3 million mark.
But perhaps the biggest surprise of the fall is what would appear to be a lack of major commercial success for Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game that earned critical raves and won several prestigious game-of-the-year awards (including The Game Awards’ top prize). VGChartz lists it as having sold just 2.6 million copies so far. That doesn’t even place it within the top 10 fall games.
Keep in mind, though, that BioWare’s fantasy franchise has a significant PC following, and PC gamers tend to purchase titles online. I reached out to EA to see if I could at least get a sense for how Dragon Age: Inquisition is faring in terms of digital sales on both console and PC, but was told, predictably, that EA doesn’t release sales figures. Industry scuttlebutt is that the game needs to sell 5 million copies to be considered a success, and it’s unclear if it’s there yet.
Which leads us back to where we started: We should probably take these numbers with a grain of salt.
Still, they provide at least rough guide for how the fall’s games ended up stacking up against one another.
And they suggest that players, not critics, ultimately determine which games fly and which ones founder.
Source:: National Post
