What do you think was the PS2's first AAA game?

[Anarchist420]

I think it was Devil May Cry which is pretty sad for two reasons:

1. the dreamcast already had good games for one year and one month when the first Devil May Cry came out.
2. the PS2 had almost been out for 1 full year when Devil May Cry came out.

Another question is... why did the PS2 launch with such few good games?

 

[Topweasel]

I think it was Devil May Cry which is pretty sad for two reasons:

1. the dreamcast already had good games for one year and one month when the first Devil May Cry came out.
2. the PS2 had almost been out for 1 full year when Devil May Cry came out.

Another question is... why did the PS2 launch with such few good games?

Because they didn't know when it would make it into the US. The PS2 had already been out in Japan for about 7-8 months. Had some major releases over there. But for the most part the PS2 had production problems with the supplier for the optical drive. They were bad and production on them was slow. So they restricted overall production till they could find a different supplier. When they did and units started selling then the big titles started coming out.

To answer the real questions though. 1.) I would consider GT3 to be the first console pushing game on the console. DMC might be considered a great game but it didn't sell consoles and honestly didn't sell that well to start off. Which brings me to question 2.) Because their isn't money in it. What you are seeing now with MS pushing games like Forza 5 and Ryse out as Xbone only consoles is generally considered bad business. Games sell the best during the first 3 weeks or so of release and fall dramatically after that. No one game is purchased for every console unless its always bundled with it and even then no promise that people are playing it. Even the best games only have an attach rate of about 8-10%. Just look at TLoU to see what a highly rated exclusive gets this late in the PS3 run. Only about 3 million sold. Now how well would it sell if it was PS4 only and released in November and on the very high side we say the PS4 sells 4 million units. Comparatively that is about 160k units sold.

Forza 5 and Ryse will never recoup the development costs. Just as Halo 1 never did. Microsoft is willing to take big hits on the software side to build early franchises to help unit and software sales later on but generally in the past you sell consoles on features and capabilities and then ramp up titles based on when the console sales hit certain milestones. The consoles that win the generation tend to then snow ball from there.

 

[exdeath]

The way you say "Only 3 million" for TLoU...

That's what's wrong with gaming. People think a game has to sell 10 million+ to be good anymore.

Yeah that's why fuck CoD.

 

[gothamhunter]

The way you say "Only 3 million" for TLoU...

That's what's wrong with gaming. People think a game has to sell 10 million+ to be good anymore.

Yeah that's why fuck CoD.

Exact same reason why Sony still thinks the latest Tomb Raider is a failure, because it "only" sold 4 million. Nevermind that it was an amazing game.

 

[Topweasel]

The way you say "Only 3 million" for TLoU...

That's what's wrong with gaming. People think a game has to sell 10 million+ to be good anymore.

Yeah that's why fuck CoD.

I said only because it's out of 80 million consoles. Not only because it's a bad sales number. Some companies would be happy if they can get 1 million at $60 a pop. But TLoU is a great example of "AAA" quality title like DMC, released at the tale end of the the PS3 life with the most amount of consoles viable to sell to. So if at the end of the life of PS3 with the largest amount of consoles available a highly rated AAA game sells 3 million copies at a ~4.5% attach rate. How well would it do on the new console? 3 million is great. 2 is good. 1 is acceptable but might cause the the viability of "AAA" franchise to be in question. But 100k would set a company back hugely. I mean you are talking about maybe getting back 10% of current production costs.

 

[purbeast0]

i was not aware that AAA title meant it had to sell X amount of copies.

in my mind, AAA has nothing to do with how many sell at all. if that were the case, the wii sports and wii fit would be AAA titles, and i'm going to have to strongly disagree about that.

 

[gothamhunter]

Overall, the first was probably Timesplitters.

For me? Either Dark Cloud or Gran Turismo 3; both came out early in the lifetime and were MY first AAA titles.

 

[exdeath]

The sooner the industry recognizes that this whole AAA business and sales like CoD are a one time fluke, and gets back to their normal games we all knew and loved, the better off we will be.

 

[Topweasel]

i was not aware that AAA title meant it had to sell X amount of copies.

in my mind, AAA has nothing to do with how many sell at all. if that were the case, the wii sports and wii fit would be AAA titles, and i'm going to have to strongly disagree about that.

AAA title mean premium titles developed by the biggest studios and generally have some of the highest development costs.

They don't need to sell a certain amount perse. But a business can't stay in business losing 50-100 million in development costs and it isn't the greatest business decision to sell a game that is unable to recoup it's cost do to lack of available consoles to sell to.

 

[purbeast0]

AAA title mean premium titles developed by the biggest studios and generally have some of the highest development costs.

They don't need to sell a certain amount perse. But a business can't stay in business losing 50-100 million in development costs and it isn't the greatest business decision to sell a game that is unable to recoup it's cost do to lack of available consoles to sell to.

yeah well looking at Naughty Dog's track record, i'd say they are more than okay. they have been around for a long long time making AAA titles for sony consoles. i don't know for a fact, but i'd be pretty confident putting my money on the last of us selling better than the uncharted franchise did initially.

 

[Topweasel]

yeah well looking at Naughty Dog's track record, i'd say they are more than okay. they have been around for a long long time making AAA titles for sony consoles. i don't know for a fact, but i'd be pretty confident putting my money on the last of us selling better than the uncharted franchise did initially.

This isn't about Last of Us. This about initial consoles sales and game sales. My example of Last of Us was just and example of a AAA exclusive title released on a console near the end of the console's cycle. A reverse of the DMC release which was near the start of the console cycle. The 3 million is great example because it shows what the attach rate is like on that type of AAA release (like DMC) when the console is in just about every home it will ever be in.

Even if you increase attach rate as a console seller (people waiting for games or lower price for the console but end up picking it up to play this game therefore there is a surge of console sales matching the initial sales of the game) to 8% vs 4% in a console saturated market. Again on a generous 4 million consoles in the wild. That is 320k in units. That's 19 million in sales. Even for a division that doesn't have 4 active teams developing one franchise for yearly releases (ala EA) its still going to be well short of the development costs and that's assuming all the money comes back to them. They probably get back something like 65-75% of that which means it's closer to 15 million recouped.

It's why I think Sony didn't mind if the their in-house developers blew their loads on PS3 games so close to the PS4 release.

 

[sweenish]

GT3 and SSX both moved units.

 

[sweenish]

I said only because it's out of 80 million consoles. Not only because it's a bad sales number. Some companies would be happy if they can get 1 million at $60 a pop. But TLoU is a great example of "AAA" quality title like DMC, released at the tale end of the the PS3 life with the most amount of consoles viable to sell to. So if at the end of the life of PS3 with the largest amount of consoles available a highly rated AAA game sells 3 million copies at a ~4.5% attach rate. How well would it do on the new console? 3 million is great. 2 is good. 1 is acceptable but might cause the the viability of "AAA" franchise to be in question. But 100k would set a company back hugely. I mean you are talking about maybe getting back 10% of current production costs.

It's not a bad sales number. $180M in revenue is not bad. Especially considering it's a "scary" game.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

2001 was a pretty massive year for PS2 games; Gran Turismo 3, Final Fantasy X, Grand Theft Auto 3, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and Metal Gear Solid 2 are some of the best selling games in PS2 history. But Tekken Tag Tournament was out at launch in 2000. That's your first legitimate AAA title.

 

[Topweasel]

It's not a bad sales number. $180M in revenue is not bad. Especially considering it's a "scary" game.

God I really wish people would actually read my posts. The "only 3 million" was only meant to be taken into account when compared to the number of PS3's available now. That means of 80 million consoles only 4.5% have a copy of TLoU next to it. If a game had that attach rate as a single console exclusive game around the time of release of the console when there are barely as many consoles as TLoU sold now, it's sales would have measured in the 100's of thousands and that would be a horrible loss.

 

[purbeast0]

God I really wish people would actually read my posts. The "only 3 million" was only meant to be taken into account when compared to the number of PS3's available now. That means of 80 million consoles only 4.5% have a copy of TLoU next to it. If a game had that attach rate as a single console exclusive game around the time of release of the console when there are barely as many consoles as TLoU sold now, it's sales would have measured in the 100's of thousands and that would be a horrible loss.

the sales numbers are fine. take a look at any of the single player focused games on the ps3. the total sales number for the top one is GTA4 at nearly 10 million. game came out 5 years ago. next is uncharted 2, which is at 6.24 million, and came out 4 years ago. i'd be willing to bet that 1/2 of those sales numbers came from the game being packed into a bundle or from the greatest hits lineup.

i just disagree with your assessment of 3 million copies of a game being low compared to the total number of ps3's out there as being a bad thing. single player focused games on the 360 are pretty comparable.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I couldn't tell you honestly because there was many games in a seemingly short timespan once things got rolling. I'd say the first blockbuster success was likely GTA3 or MGS2. They seemed to have a wide appeal. I don't really remember what came before what.

 

[smackababy]

I think GTA3 was a huge sleeper hit. I don't know anyone who played GTA2 on console. I played it on PC, but I am probably in the minority of GTA3 players who knew about it. I never ever played GTA1.

 

[sweenish]

God I really wish people would actually read my posts. The "only 3 million" was only meant to be taken into account when compared to the number of PS3's available now. That means of 80 million consoles only 4.5% have a copy of TLoU next to it. If a game had that attach rate as a single console exclusive game around the time of release of the console when there are barely as many consoles as TLoU sold now, it's sales would have measured in the 100's of thousands and that would be a horrible loss.

I did read it. You should stop calling the sales numbers bad. They aren't.

 

[lamedude]

The early years is where franchises are born. If Gears, CoD2, Oblivion, and Dead Rising were Xbox01 games and if Halo launched on PC instead would they be the as popular today? The attach rate so high in the first year it got analyst saying it was a bad thing. If MS wants to make Ryse Medieval Warfare and Ryse Praetorian Ops a launch game will get them the most mindshare.
Back on topic Tekken Tag I guess (picking most popular launch game).

 

[Topweasel]

I did read it. You should stop calling the sales numbers bad. They aren't.

Then you didn't read a single word I typed. Hell take my words out of context and quote me on the part where I called the sales numbers bad.

My one time referencing 3 million as "only" was only in reference to attach rate. Which is pretty large. My point was that number becomes unmanageably low when you have that attach rate on a console that has 3% of the consoles. Now you are talking about 3% of 3%, or a couple hundred thousand units and that is small.

 

[Topweasel]

i just disagree with your assessment of 3 million copies of a game being low compared to the total number of ps3's out there as being a bad thing. single player focused games on the 360 are pretty comparable.

No, no, no, I am saying compared to what the sales would be like if it was released in lets say March where their is only 3-4 million consoles. That would be bad.

The attach rate is pretty good. But it's an unsustainable amount very early in the console life unless a company is willing to eat the development costs to as someone put it, earn mindshare.

TLoU was my point because it was a successful game. Not because it was a failure. It's to show that a single console exclusive with a decent sized budget would lose tons of money released early into a console cycle. It's not like TLoU would eventually sell the 3 million as more PS4's hit the market. After the first three weeks a game would have made 90% of what will through it's entire life. People are not going to go back to it in droves. To many new games come out on a regular basis and peoples attentions are too small for their to be a late surge in sales 3 years later to make up for it's original release and sales of 150-190k units.

 

[smackababy]

No, no, no, I am saying compared to what the sales would be like if it was released in lets say March where their is only 3-4 million consoles. That would be bad.

The attach rate is pretty good. But it's an unsustainable amount very early in the console life unless a company is willing to eat the development costs to as someone put it, earn mindshare.

TLoU was my point because it was a successful game. Not because it was a failure. It's to show that a single console exclusive with a decent sized budget would lose tons of money released early into a console cycle. It's not like TLoU would eventually sell the 3 million as more PS4's hit the market. After the first three weeks a game would have made 90% of what will through it's entire life. People are not going to go back to it in droves. To many new games come out on a regular basis and peoples attentions are too small for their to be a late surge in sales 3 years later to make up for it's original release and sales of 150-190k units.

I agree the current attachment rate to sales rate of TLoU would be unacceptable for a PS4 launch title, I disagree it would translate over directly. I think the attach rate would be much, much higher if it were a launch title; the reason is there are less games actually being released. Consumers won't just buy the console and no games, that makes no sense.

 

[Topweasel]

I agree the current attachment rate to sales rate of TLoU would be unacceptable for a PS4 launch title, I disagree it would translate over directly. I think the attach rate would be much, much higher if it were a launch title; the reason is there are less games actually being released. Consumers won't just buy the console and no games, that makes no sense.

Agreed. But we also can't believe it would be everyone's cup of tea. Which is why when I was talking unit sales. I doubled it up to 8%-10% which is more realistic and would be a fantastic attach rate. But it still would be to low in actual unit sales to make the game profitable.

Go back to DVD and Blu-ray. Speilberg would refuse to let the studios sell his movies until they had hit certain points in total set top unit sales. The reason for it was to maximise the amount of sales they could get because if they released the movie earlier even if it was the best selling disc at the time it would only a fraction of the sales they could get by waiting 2 years. For consoles that is even more of an issue, because those movies already earned like most of the potential earnings long ago. Console games live and die by their original release date and AAA exclusives will always have a hard time getting a return on development if released when the consoles penetration is at its smallest.

Which goes back to the main point. You don't see the kind of games the OP wants to see early in a consoles launch (or a Day One release) unless the company (MS or Sony) is willing to take a big hit in Development costs in hopes of A.) Starting a Franchise B.) To push console sales in hopes that more sales means more games which means more consoles. Nowadays Sony and MS understand the snowball affect of having a strong early lineup. But it still has to be handled in moderation. When the PS2 launched it's penetration was so low due to held back production that any studio with a PS2 only game was going to have to eat the whole production.

 

[nageov3t]

Final Fantasy X was it for me.