What determines the success of any game?

[Ferdinand]

Last week, I read a report relating to a game that was recently launched. The thing was that the development team got dissolved because a few weeks after launch, the game only sold half a million copies.

Do you think sales should be the only metrics to measure the success of any game? How about a strong community? What exactly can you say makes a game quite successful?

 

[Oliver]

Sales as the only metric is a convenient fiction for publishers who want to justify decisions they've already made. Planescape: Torment sold poorly on release and is now considered one of the best RPGs ever made. Conversely there are titles that sold extremely well and left no lasting impression on anyone.

Longevity, critical reassessment over time, and cultural impact all tell you more than launch week numbers. The problem is that none of those are useful to an executive trying to justify a studio closure. So we end up measuring success by the only metric that's easy to weaponise.

 

[Tyler]

Sales tell you how well the game was marketed. That's about it. Red Dead 2 took years to make and sold massive. Concord was dead in two weeks. Both came out of massive studios. The metric that actually matters is whether people are still talking about it six months later — or whether anyone's still playing it.

 

[Lukas]

Worth distinguishing between commercial success and cultural success. A game can fail commercially and retain a devoted community for decades — Oliver's Planescape example is the obvious one. Equally a game can sell thirty million copies and be forgotten within a year. The question of what success means is really a question of whose interests you are measuring against — publisher, developer, player, or critic. Those four groups rarely agree.

 

[Ryan]

From a retail side it was always units shifted, full stop. We'd push certain titles because they were 'performing' regardless of what customers actually thought. The games I watched come back as returns within the first week were sometimes the ones doing the biggest numbers. Always a weird thing to watch from behind the counter.