ChrisDeku

I’m somewhat dubious of the 200k claim on PS5 as it appears to be doing well in the PSN charts. It’s possible its just a weak sales period overall but I don’t know…

200k would be really really bad for a day one release. Is that part of the Gamepass effect of devaluing products by association, or is interest in Doom just waning?

Doom Eternal made $450m in 9 months, so this is looking like a massive shortfall compared to that, even if the 200k number is wrong and it’s like double that.

@GamingFan4Lyf

Unfortunately Microsoft published statements are worthless because they’ve basically never acknowledged any game to undersell ever, they’re basically the opposite of Square Enix.

“Hi-Fi RUSH was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations. We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release.”

@Dodoo I anssume Expedition 33’s Digital sales are not included here. This only includes digital sales if the publisher shares the data. Nintendo and some of the small publishers are not signed up top the agreement.

Game does not have enough shooty shooty or stabby stabby for the usual Push Square crowd. I, personally, am quite interested in this.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favourite games of all time(there was a time such a comment would have got you lynched in certain areas) and I’m so happy there will be more, even if it is ages away.

@Toot1st Except Microsoft still shutdown studios, and fire people, that don’t perform well. The metrics they use are unknown but being on gamepass is not a free pass. It wasn’t for Hi-Fi Rush, and that game cost a fraction of Doom: The Dark Ages and had higher reviews

@djlard

hope to be their customer in descent future.

Are you going to live underground?

I wouldn’t say the game is a total flop but the numbers are very underwhelming and in regards to pure sales it will struggle to ever break even over it’s lifetime, so it depends how much value MS put on that and how much they value the Gamepass contribution.

It’s kinda funny how people universally understand sales numbers and know how to compare that to other similar games but as soon as player numbers are mentioned a lot of people become completely devoid of any critical thinking skills.

So is 3m players good? Firstly, it depends on whether or not Doom is considered a big game or not? I would say it is a big game and the last 2 games sold pretty well. Doom Eternal sold just behind Ghost of Tsushima in its debut year in the USA, i believe slightly ahead in Europe. GoT is a 13M+ game. Doom is also a longstanding franchise with a core fan base.

So in this context how does 3m players look? Well launch numbers are known for a lot of other big games. God of War: Ragnarok did 5.1m in its first 3 days. GoW(2018), TLOUII and Spider-man all did around 4m+. That’s sales on a single platform at $60-70. Also, player numbers tend to be greater than sales due to game sharing etc. so a 4m sales is more like 5-5.5m players if the data was available(it used to be on Gamstat and player number would be around 30-50% higher than sales).

So 3m players across all 3 formats while being available to a significant number of the 30m+ gamepass subscribers sounds incredibly weak for what I consider a big game. A comparable game on all systems would be MH:World which did 8m sales over 3 days as a full price title. IF wilds was on gamepass how many players would it get? 15m? 20m? It’s a bit unfair to compare to an absolute megahit but it’s not that its behind MH:Wilds that’s relevant, its the size of the gap.

Also, another point of note. The claim of it reaching 3m players 7x faster seems incredibly dubious. That would mean Doom Eternal only only had around 450K players over launch week, but that game sold comparable to GoT which launched with 2.2m sales in 3 days and Doom being a big known franchise would generally imply sales are more front loaded rather than having strong legs.

Edit: oh the Doom eternal comparison is about time, not sales. So Eternal sold around 3m in a months, and the new game took presumably about 4-5 days for the 3m player numbers so its “7x faster”. It’s a pretty disingenuous stat considering it heavily skews towards a game available day one on a sub service. For the gap to remain constant it would need 21m player in a month which it’s obviously not going to do as player numbers fall off hard after the first week. Doom Eternal probably sold around 2m in it’s first week so it would be a more accurate comparison to say it had 50% more players than Eternal over the same time period.

I love Housemarque, can’t wait for Saros. However, it does sound a little bit like they’re trying to present themselves as taking the high road here.

Here’s the thing though. Housemarque already tried making a live service game. They gave up on their traditional arcade games(saying they make no money) and put all their resources into Stormdivers, which even made it to public test stages. The game was complete garbage though and they got saved by Sony giving them a publishing deal for Returnal which was a secondary product that was in pre-production with a small team at the same time, and everybody went to work on Returnal instead.

@Vovander

What’s your take on these gameplay videos?

They don't look impressive but it also just looks like kinda normalish gameplay outside of exciting moments. When I look at it I kind of think a random scene from Spec Ops: The Line would also look similar to this and that game was kind of ingenious and is retrospectively considered a masterpiece.

Is it likely to be some subversive storytelling similar to Spec Ops pretending to be a bro shooter when it's actually a Heart of Darkness riff with pretty deep themes? Probably not but anything is possible, I like to love In hope.

@Vovander there's really no ground between that and seeing a one minute clip and declaring it completely dreadful?

People just love to hate these days...

@DryWater So, only GOTY level games? Got you, I'll let the devs know.

It’s one of those AA games everyone here keeps asking for so i’m sure its going to sell like gangbusters

@8bitOG Sure, I’ll take your word over the actual artist. Jog on.

This is an early example of the Marathon artstyle that the Art Director created and published 11 years ago on his own page:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Marathon/comments/1ko6c96/joseps_art_from_11_years_ago/#lightbox

11 years ago was before the Antireal account existed and she had not created any publicly available art by this point.

This is also another widely known proponent of this style that again existed before Antireal:

https://www.machine56.com/

You can also go back and look at things like Wipeout and see how close they are to that same style.

https://sl.bing.net/ddT5bGcHMcu

Again, the style is so close to Cyberpunk that it is practically pointless to separate them. The key thing is Cross was creating those androids in this style, that are the core to the Marathon game, way before Anti-real did anything similar. Machine 56 also did the decal style that Anti-real used first, is anyone claiming she stole their artstyle?

@BAMozzy That design language and aesthetic was 100% not created by that artist though, and you can find lots of examples of the exact same kind of art dating back over 2 decades. It’s basically just cyberpunk with lots of primary colours.

You also can’t steal an artstyle.

@8bitOG You’re blinded by rage bait. The artist detailed exactly what was stolen without her permission. She highlighted 3-4 decals that were included in the game.

Her art and the game share an artstyle that predates boths work and has existed for a long time and belongs to no one. Joseph cross has lots of posted artwork in this style that predates even the existence of the artist “Antireal”, some 11 years old when that artist was still a teenager. Again though, the art style existed way before that.

The art looks similar because it uses the exact same artstyle.

@8bitOG That's a total lie

@Cutmastavictory No, there’s almost no power creep and very little vertical progression. They actually did a big rebalance patch that gave buffs to a lot of existing weapons too.

You will be able to buy warbonds from the super credits picked up during games and the ones in the free warbond so just have a good idea what items you want to unlock first.

Most of the important weapons are the support weapons and they’re basically all in the base game(minus some gimmicky ones)

SAG-AFTRA’s position now seems to be basically all AI voice work should be illegal regardless of permission being obtained. I’m not sure about this position at all.

I feel like AI just needs to be let loose(countries like China will just do whatever is economically best for their companies and they’ll gain a comparative advantage otherwise) and human voice acting needs to try and rebrand itself. Like Organic food, which has basically no scientific benefits over non-organic food but people love to buy Organic and pay more for it.

100% Organic Voice Acting certified.

@BAMozzy They didn't steal the arystyle,thats a ridiculous idea. There's like a few decals in the game that were lifted from someone, which they said was the result of a single employee.

There's artwork from Joseph Cross, the art Director, showing art that looks like concept art for Marathon that he publicly posted 11 years ago. The artsyke has also been around for the last 20+ years, no one created it.

@get2sammyb it released in February and it's sales were quite heavily favoured towards NA

@Hi569 Marathon is not a Concord, that’s nonsense.

The Marathon North American Closed Alpha, that only gave invites to around 10% of applicants, had 10x as many peak players on Steam as Concords full release Day One. Marathon currently has 406k user in their Discord. There’s lots of people interested in the game if they can fix the issues and offer a strong Endgame. The core gameplay is very good.

Paul Tassi’s recent Articles:

Netflix’s Best New No.1 Show Has a Perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score

Amazon Just Cancelled The No.2 Show In It’s Top 10 List

The Best Place to Farm Mass Lumina Points in ‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Monday, May 19

Does that sound like a legitimate Journalist who secret internal sources trust with sensitive information? “Oh I’ve got some big secret news to break, I’m gonna go contact that guy that does the NY times puzzle clue articles and tv show clickbait articles. Can’t think of a single better person to contact.”

It's another fake story from Paul Tassi. The dude's just a clickbait huckster.

This doesn't even sound like a legitimate target for any game, nevermind a $40 live service seasonal game(Circana bases charts on dollar sales of the boxed title, no Mtx is included). So to be ranked ahead of a top 5 game at $70 it would need to sell almost twice as much of the boxed game, and the bar for top 5 is probay a global 10m seller. He's effectively saying they are targeting close to 20m units in 3 months(unless their sales are really skewed towards USA)

Companies have targets like revenue and user engagement and user retention. Not top 5 Npd game(note: it's not even been called Npd for years, an actual journalist would know that)

Paul tassi openly stated he doesn't like Extraction shooters yet all he does is post marathon articles and he even posted a 45 minute video yesterday about how Marathon has already failed titled "it's just over for Marathon" (because he knows the audience he's seeking doesn't read articles)

@Fishnpeas Total lies, Neil Druckmann is credited as the lead writer of The Last of Us in addition to being Co-director so he created the entire game and all it's cast most likely.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2140553/fullcredits/

@LifeGirl Hyperbole is 100% preferable to your modus operandi

@MFTWrecks You’ve been reading bad information because that’s all that exists about Marathon. Fake information from people that never played the game.

There is tons of meta progression in Marathon. Basically all the factions have skill trees you upgrade through doing contracts and the vast majority of contracts require you to achieve a specific thing in the map and are immediately completed upon doing them, it doesn’t even matter if you extract successfully. Some items give you money to your vault immediately, xp happens immediately etc. Leveling up the factions also expands the stores available to you between runs meaning you can buy better equipment straight from the store before you make a run(the stores were a bit underwhelming in the alpha but can easily be fixed).

You also don’t lost everything when you die anyway, only the things you have on you. In an extraction shooter you will be maintaining a large inventory of items in your vault and carefully choosing what to take with you.

In the Alpha Marathon was actually not punishing enough. Losing your items was almost irrelevant, and that is one of the major complaints about the game. Again, it’s mostly about it not conforming to traditional extraction shooter ideas.

@HRdepartment I replayed the game last year, and I really enjoyed it but the combat system is hilariously unbalanced. Every character has a gimmick attack that can be maxed out to 9999 damage by doing some completely boring task over and over and over again. All the animations in the end game take so long that it completely screwed up the ATB system and things like regen work in real time so regen with super long animation attacks is like a full heal. Characters get insanely powerful so the game just throws lots of instant kill abilities around.

I can't wait to see Kuja with his effeminate style and mankini with full bare midriff in glorious 4k/60. I wonder if he would be considered woke these days.

@MFTWrecks You’re completely wrong. Marathon does innovate and it is way more accessible than traditional Extraction Shooters. Arc Raiders plays much more like a standard military sim like extraction game where you run around large areas that are like Rust style survival worlds. Marathon’s maps are small, with high density of action and confrontation and rounds are super fast and fluid. The characters being hero like classes with special abilities is also quite unique in the extraction shooter genre.

Most of the hate Marathon get’s is because of all the ways it differs from other extraction shooters. Heroes, small maps, high density maps, fast paced, high pvp encounters etc.

@Ralizah Yes, but Paul Tassi doesn’t have any sources because he’s not a respected journalist. He gets basically 100% of his stories from Reddit posts and joins in whatever the popular narrative is. Bashing Marathon is now what gets clicks. I’ve played Marathon and it’s actually amazing. The narrative surrounding it is completely fake by people who hate live service games and all the usual chuds who have decided the game is woke, which is completely insane. The people making Marathon have been pretty confident about the product and I doubt morale is through the floor because some slacker stole a few decals because he was too lazy to do his actual job on time.

@somnambulance

CoD is still the yearly king for PS sales, and it, Overwatch, and Minecraft each alone makes more revenue than anything else in the industry currently outside of only Fortnite.

This just isn’t true. Minecraft makes something like $400-500m a year, which puts its below things like Apex Legends, Genshin Impact, Counter-strike 2 etc. etc. League of Legends is over $2b a year. Marvel Rivals is going to hit around $1b in it’s first 12 months.

Overwatch 2 had a peak yearly revenue of $190m in 2023. That’s in line with a moderately successful single player game ~3-4m units.

@somnambulance

MS has generated $465 million in gaming revenue of software sales and EA is the second largest publisher with $366 million in software sales. It’s public knowledge and Pushsquare has reported on it.

Thats one single quarter, the quarter they released CoD and no one else released big games. Again, GoW:Ragnarok sold 11m units in 3 months, that's like well over $500m in one quarter. GTAVI will be like $3b in a quarter on itself. MS aren't the biggest publisher because they were first in one single quarter where they released their biggest game and not much else came out.

On PS they're now a major player(less so on Steam), but that's basically on CoD alone. As impressive as Forza and Sea of Thieves selling 1.5m copies is that's still not that close to the real big boys. If they release the next FH day one then we can see the if it can get into the 4m opening weekend numbers.

What a surprise this article is written by Paul Tassi and citing ‘Anonymous sources”. This dude is a Destiny 2 superfan who’s been making negative articles about Marathon for the last month. No idea what his issue is, but he has a long history of being a bit of a clown.

@somnambulance

Also, don’t forget that Microsoft is now the largest selling publisher on PlayStation and Steam

There’s no way that’s actually true. Especially on Steam since CoD isn’t even that big there(compared to PS). What exactly were the games they were selling on Steam last year? Indiana Jones had a Peak user count of 12k, hellblade 2 was 3k, Flight Sim 2024 was 24k, Ara was 4k and age of mythology Reforged was 25k.

Add all those up and you’re getting sales in like the 1-2m range. Helldivers 2 sold like 10m on Steam, and Palworld was around 15m. Black Myth was probably over 20m on steam. So even in CoD pushed close to 10m on Steam(again, steam is not a strong market for CoD) it’s still only getting into the Helldivers range(Sony also released H:FW, GoT and GoW: Ragnarok, all 3 of which had peak user counts higher than everyone of those MS games listed above).

On PS their sales are basically 95% from CoD(+minecraft), so whatever that sells in a random year would be the number, 15-25m? The other games barely sell enough to matter. Even this year when they released 3 games in April and “Dominated” the PSN sales chart those 3 games combined were like 1.5m sales units for that month. A big game like GoW: Ragnarok sells 5.1m units in it’s first 3 days.

So, no, MS are nowhere near a big time publisher. They have inherited massive hits in CoD and Minecraft but most of their games sell in modest numbers and no one is looking to them as a big publisher to see what exciting new games they’re promoting(they have a very modest history in bringing big titles to the public in the last decade)

The interesting thing I’ve noticed often is that MS published games seem to be much more negatively affected by gamepass than 3rd party games that launch on gamepass day one. For example Blue Prince launched on gamepass and PS Plus Extra and that still got a 19K peak CCU number on Steam as a tiny indie game. That’s over 50% more than Indiana Jones, and about 13x South of Midnight(which launched at the same time) and about 5x more than Hellblade 2.

A lot of those MS numbers are really abysmal and I imagine they’re still very much relying on these sales numbers to generate a significant amount of revenue to fund these games and be able to put them on Gamepass day one. I have major concerns about the viability of this model going forward, which is unfortunate as I get gamepass basically for free from MS rewards just by having Bing as my search engine and subscribing once every 2-3 months to catch up on games. It’s a pretty great deal for me 😅

@belmont Yes, steam location is the key one. For PS account you don't need a vpn at all.

There's also other workarounds. You can have a friend gift you a copy if they are in a region that can play the game, and that works.

@belmont what exactly are you saying? Of course you can buy the game anywhere in the world with a vpn, that's what vpns are.

Previously you could buy Helldivers 2 in any country, without a vpn, and there was no problem. When psn accounts were put back in then there was still not a problem as there was no region locking. People could create psn accounts anywhere, no vpn needed. The issue was that people complained about this, said they didn't want to to do this because they didn't want to break the TOS(wrong location) and there was talks of legal proceedings against Sony for Mandating PSN in countries it wasnt available in. Sony responding to that with the simplest solution of just removing it from any country PSN is not supported(people who already bought it can still play).

Theres lots of ways to still buy the games in these countries obviously, even without Vpns you can do some game keys that let you activate even if you're in the forbidden territory(not all keys work).

@Mostik I think you didn't read the article, bro

Good old Rockstar will bring out the £70 60FPS patch edition and will sell 27m copies.

@bleeflooflah it's open and publicly available information as disclosed by the game Director but people chose to ignore it

@Fiendish-Beaver The Days Gone 2 pitch was for a fully co-op shared world game, not a single player game. That sounds like a studio that took themselves off single player games.

Bro, you’re preaching to the atheist society

I bet they do a live service 40k game. The gameplay of HD2 would just work so well.