It’s a shock that Square Enix greenlights any games anymore, as it almost always announces its projects have underperformed afterwards. This is perhaps best evidenced by its Tomb Raider reboot, which sold millions of copies at launch, and was still dubbed a failure by upper-management. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy has fallen to a similar fate, with initial sales short of the publisher’s expectations.
The good news is that the title’s performance has turned around, thanks in part to positive word of mouth and some heavy discounting. Speaking as part of its quarterly financial report, the publisher explained that the game has since made up for its shortfall in launch sales, and is more or less back on track. It picked up the award for Best Narrative at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards last year, and has been largely embraced by anyone who’s tried it.
We reckon the fallout from Marvel’s Avengers really hurt Starlord here, and in truth, Square Enix’s marketing wasn’t the greatest – even if reviews were super positive from the outset. Ultimately, the cream will always rise to the top, so while the publisher has had to work a little harder than perhaps it expected to flog this title, at least it’s now beginning to get the respect it deserves.
[source hd.square-enix.com, via metro.co.uk]
Comments 72
Still hope to see one more patch with further visual polishes.
The game itself is fantastic!
I bet the Avengers flop did hurt it. Also it wasn't released while any Guardians of the Galaxy movie was in theaters, so they didn't get that promotional bump. Or maybe they just have too high of expectations.
This company has to be so painful to work for. Game reviews great and sells I would objectively well but SE has stupid expectations and says it didn’t make the cut.
Have they actually said any game has met their expectations???
Whatever Square Enix. I personally loved the game and thought it was one of my GOTY for 2021. Excellently written and acted, with a great story and some cool looking worlds.
Really liked what i played of it so far. Admittedly im not many hours through it but i think they have captured thu humor perfectly of each member of the cast. Drax being my favorite.
Didnt sell spiderman numbers so SE automatically say its a fail (eye rolls)
Can't wait for people to blame The Avengers for it.
Quality =/= sales
@sentiententity There it is.
It didn't flop. Far from it. I know facts don't matter, but still: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/09/15/marvels-avengers-has-sold-better-than-you-think-this-year/?sh=496d57701c96
I’m sure the negative avengers press, lack of Big Marvel film hype around release. And the fact that the character models look nothing like the big screen counterpart, really slowed the interest from casual fans (myself included)
The initial reveal of the game, probably showed off the most boring part of the game. That probably didn't help at all either.
@Stragen8 I was the same but by the end of the game I actually preferred the videogame characters more than the movie ones. The movies are still great though.
Nailed it on both fronts. First off the unrealistic expectations they put on sales numbers for games like Hitman, Tomb Raider, or Deus Ex were all absurd. Sadly GotG actually probably would have been a 10+ million seller if Avengers wasn't released first. The excitement of a high quality AAA marvel game released on all platforms should have put up huge numbers. But a lot of gamers felt burned by Avengers and didn't want to take a chance on a game that looked very similar in the trailers.
Its a good story, with good voice-acting and great representations of the Guardians but if there's going to be a sequel there needs to be deeper gameplay. Once the novelty wore off the combat mechanics was too simplistic and barely required any tactics beyond spamming abilities when available.
@FatalBubbles Most important rules in business:
1. More = better
2. Even more is never enough
Geez their expectations must be absurd for many of their single player games. This is basically just a way of saying they want mobile revenue from their single player games. Why cant they have both high, medium and low revenue games?
Many were hoping for a co-op game with the Guardians. It may have been off-putting that it’s single player.
I've heard a lot of good things about this game and Guardians are one of my favourite Marvel properties, Just a bit scunnered with the barrage of Star Wars and Marvel stuff since Disney bought them over. Will definitely play it at some point!
Its a very good game and really surprised me, pretty much everything Avengers wasn't.
Yea unless its one of this companies overused Final Fantasy games, its usually deemed a failure in this publishers eyes.
I picked up the PS5 version on Black Friday. Fantastic game and it didn't get the recognition it deserved.
I liked this game but to me it screams of a launching off point for a better sequel that builds on what we saw in the first one.
I grabbed this during Black Friday and this game is very much exclusively for fans of the films or comics. I played for about an hour and forgot about it because I just could not stand their banter.
I cynically wonder if SE have such unrealistic sales targets as a way out of paying developer bonuses and the like. The game had sales a fair few other companies would be envious about
@naruball Sad truths. Same with Battlefield and COD: Vanguard. While they may not have met sales expectations they didn't flop either. In fact were some of the biggest selling games of the year.
Plus a lot of MTX for Avengers.
Was pleasantly surprised playing it on PS5. I had zero expectations and enjoyed it.
Probably helped that I only paid £29 for it in a Black Friday sale.
Surely this game has some kind of record for the longest continuous VO in a game?! xD
They barely stopped talking throughout!
This was one of my favorite games of the year. The story, writing, characters were just so spectacular, and the comedy genre is so underrepresented in gaming, it was fantastic. I do agree with others, the gameplay got monotonous and stale really early on, but that's true of every Marvel game I've seen, including Insomniac's Spiderman games, so I just expect that as a mandate of the Disney license to make it "accessible."
@Ken_Kaniff FFXV was a "failure", too. As was DQXI. And Tomb Raider. All among their top selling, top grossing games. They literally declare everything a sales failure, even their top sellers.
They want mobile and FFXIV MMO money, and everything else is a failure.
More accurately, I suspect there's some funny accounting going on so that everything can "fail" because the money is going...somewhere... Either that or they have Patcher as their sales analyst.
I'm a big GotG movie fan but had no interest in this game, from the non-movie graphics to the Avenger game disaster I always figured this would crash and burn and be on PS+ soon enough.
@NEStalgia About how long was the game that it was monotonous and you finished it? If It's less than 15 hours I can probably borrow it from the library. Once they finish the remodel and reopen.
@jmads i would actually disagree with you on that, i never read the comics and not seen any of the movies, and i really enjoyed the game. Picked it up on sale over xmas and loved it. Thought the story was good.
@NEStalgia wait a minute. When did they say that FFXV was a failure?
@themightyant I'm just wondering how much Guardians sold. Everyone is acting like it sold well, but SE's expectations were too high. To my knowledge we have no idea how it performed. Only that it made some top 10 lists, but nothing special.
Are SE being SE or did the game simply not sell well by most publishers' standards?
Sounds good, let's get back to Deus Ex then, shall we? Please and thank you!
The game is good though, but after avengers I'm wary of another squareenix marvel games.
love it the banter is awesome they nailed guardians.
frankly the game is better than most marvel films
If mass effect legendary edition didn't come out last year guardians of the galaxy would have been my game of the year
Guardians of the galaxy was such a solid game, really enjoyed it. Is there any wonder there is such interest in live service games when titles like this get ignored?
@naruball We simply don't know. But sadly I think not as well as it deserved, but also not atrociously. It was consistently in the top 10 or 20 games each week after launch for the first 2 months. But probably not the sales that SquareEnix wanted until they cut the cost.
"It’s a shock that Square Enix greenlights any games anymore, as it almost always announces its projects have underperformed afterwards. This is perhaps best evidenced by its Tomb Raider reboot, which sold millions of copies at launch, and was still dubbed a failure by upper-management. "
I guess Square is the game company equivalent of the stereotypical Asian parent.
@naruball It was years back, so I don't remember any links or articles or anything, but I think it goes back to when Tabata was sent packing.
@rjejr It's actually pretty long, I'd say it's closer to the 25h mark at least, maybe more, especially if you take the time to explore when you can and get all the conversations in. I did play through it again so someone else could watch so it was more of a speed-run and it still took several full evenings to go through it.
Totally worth it if you like a good comedy/sci-fi though. I don't even like Marvel, like, at all, and I thought it was great to experience. But the gameplay does wear out its welcome after probably 30% through. It's just dull and repetitive. But I haven't seen a single Marvel game that isn't. Seems like a boilerplate required of the franchise.
My friends and I all would have bought copies if we could have played it co-op. It looked way more engaging than Avengers, what with being story-focused and not a loot fest.
@NEStalgia I read that it was the fastest selling game in history and that last year it was reported that it had sold over 9.5m. Whatever SE may have to say, it sold well. As for Guardians, in may have actually sold badly, as we have zero numbers and that's not good at all.
@naruball @themightyant Oh, I'm not saying I don't think XV sold well (and I happen to be in the internet minority that personally likes the game, though I hate what happened with the bizarre patchwork DLC), I'm just saying it's included in the list of games including best sellers S-E says "didn't meet expectations" which adds to the absurdity of them saying that about, literally, every game they sell.
Between this and Outriders, there's a new pattern of Square not releasing numbers and calling things failures. People can Fly weren't paid their royalties on Outriders based on non-reported numbers and Square's good word that it didn't put up requisite numbers without actually reporting those numbers even to PCF, but PCF's active player data showed that there should have been at least something there. There's no question there's funny accounting going on at S-E. Whether it's "illegal" accounting in Japan or not, IDK, but there's definitely shifty allocations of results. Maybe they're plugging the Avengers shaped hole with funds from other games, or maybe other failures and ventures along the way. I get the uneasy feeling a scandal will eventually be uncovered there.
It wouldn't be the first time, we can't forget what happened at Index that led to Atlus getting sold to Sega. Maybe "someone should buy S-E" has more merit than the meme realizes.
@riceNpea
Yeah. Same. I really liked it at first but then it becomes repetitive and not too fond of the samey puzzles.
The initial marketing was terrible and I had no interest despite loving the movies. As reviews came in, I was intrigued and picked it up for half-price during a sale. It has great writing and characterization with fun combat. I loved it from start to finish and got the platinum. I really hope it gets a sequel.
@NEStalgia I liked FFXV too (there's at least 3 of us out here) I just didn't love it by the end and so it ranks pretty low on my FF chart. That's still higher than a lot of other games.
On Outriders: did PCF even get sales numbers or bonuses? There was the one report back in August but then nothing was reported that I heard.
Glad this did well in the end. Great story and design (except for Peter Quill's punchable douche face).
One of my favorite games of 2021 which was a surprise to me. I hope and can't wait for a sequel. Which the game sets up nicely at the end if they decide to do it.
Another reason Capcom is the goat of third party games.
Oh boy. Can't wait to see what they will say with FF Origins, Forspoken and Babylon Fall as those aren't looking very appetizing.
It released to close to black Friday I waited until then to buy it.
I enjoyed it a ton. Would love if they continue making them.
I still plan on buying this one, sure its worth it, just have not had the time
@DomGC Agreed, on pretty much all points! The only one is the gameplay. By the time you were just doing ridiculous size battles all over the last environment (by that point there were a few spots that tanked to like 8fps trying to handle all the on screen action even though 95% of the game was smooth), I was preeeety sick of the gameplay loop. I started getting antsy around the time at the start of the 3rd act when you have to ride all of those moving platforms escaping the big ship, it just seemed so drawn out with so many excess enemies.
But the writing, characters, story, humor, everything was quite a few levels above what I'd normally expect from Marvel. Of course, it was the main writer from the Deus Ex games, so it all makes sense
@themightyant LOL, true that.
I'm not sure if they ever did get the numbers. You would think so. I would hope so. But I definitely remember that early period Square just pretty much stonewalled them on their contractual information. No public numbers, no private numbers just a nod and a wink and a statement that "it didn't sell enough to owe royalties" without actual numbers to back the claim, and with player stats indicating the claim was bogus.
They always seem to have higher sales expectations from Square Enix Europe than the Japanese side, you barely hear them saying the JP games haven't hit target. Yet GotG, Tomb Raider, Avengers, Deus Ex, Hitman all seemed to miss SE's mark. Time to sell up these studios to Sony!
@naruball Still a horrible game. 🤪
Avengers to be clear.
@FatalBubbles unfortunately square-enix isn't the company it used to be, I miss the days when they were bringing out some classic games like they used to on the ps1 and ps2.
The games' story was so good it put me off The Witcher Season 2 on Netflix. Half way through the show I realised I was watching the exact same story as GotG but the game did it much better.
And if a game is telling a better story than a TV show, why watch the show?
Maybe lack of confidence in advertising the game, and too much expectations don't really match that much.
Even as someone who couldn't care less about Marvel, GotG was my surprise hit of last year. A definite GOTY contender alongside the greats.
I laugh every time someone says GOTG is an awesome game or the 2021 GOTY. There is an awesome story here, but you spend a majority of the time walking down corridors with endless banter and extremely underwhelming combat.
I had an absolute blast on my first playthrough of this. Getting the platinum was a little laborious though, as the alternative paths were generally not that different (other than Hellbender's palace), and I generally found it lacked replayability.
@theheadofabroom The platinum was a real pain because the collectibles required a second playthrough if you missed them, my only real complaint with the game and if someone doesn’t care about trophies then they were good to go.
@naruball Thank you.
@FatalBubbles it would be nice if a game of that length had some extra replayability, or post-endgame content, because otherwise I feel it struggles to justify its RRP (yes it's discounted regularly, but what outside of first party titles isn't?)
Other than that, I totally agree - my first playthrough was great, and if you can pick up the game for £15-25 that's all you need.
Here are some possible initial problems I think the game has, you can only play as Peter quill, possibly too much rocket raccoon (this is a personal one for me since I absolutely hate this *****), no movie tie-in, and general hesitation. I wasn't even interested in this game at all when it launched, it went on sale quite a few times before I even considered buying it too, but so much positive word of mouth finally made me bite the bullet in November for the deluxe edition and I gotta say......... It was pretty damned great.
I still don't like peter much and hate rocket even more, but it was still good. I really dig the soundtrack too which was why I got the deluxe, it's a shame it supposedly underperformed, didn't really enjoy many games as much as this one last year.
@jbreez00 my only disappointment with the soundtrack is that it doesn't include the licensed tracks. At the price, that seems kinda mean.
@NEStalgia "I'm just saying it's included in the list of games including best sellers S-E says "didn't meet expectations""
When did they say that?
@Flaming_Kaiser nah. The campaign was universally praised. The rest should have never existed in the first place, as the developers were incapable of making it fun or interesting or... anything positive. As a single player game it would have been great.
It probably would have sold better had it not had annoying dialogue from the characters every 5 seconds ....
@naruball I dont buy a game for one thing to be good i just want a good complete package. If im paying €60 for a microtransaction FF then it better be all good. The total package is just dissapointing it just isnt there.
Marvel's Avengers put me totally off of getting this, after stumbling across a couple of reviews and a plethora of comments raving about the game I finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago (discounted by about 20%) but still haven't had chance to play it yet as I'm trying to get GT Sport finished before GT 7 launches... So I might not get around to it for some time now...
I'm sure it's a great game, but sadly in no hurry to play! I'll pick it up once I see it drop down to $20 New.
@Flaming_Kaiser it's a good thing, then, that you don't have to pay €60 for it. As for Microtransactions, you don't need a hundred outfits or nameplates to enjoy the game. What you can get for free is more than enough. You can completely ignore them/pretend they don't exist.
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