LogFAQs > #909407659

ernieforss posted...

i think it will flop because Red Dead isn't a known IP. People in the industry think it will do grand thief auto numbers, Red Dead isn't known to common people like Grand Thief Auto is.

Red Dead Redemption sold more than 15 million copies. That's almost enough to put it in the top 50 best-selling games of all time. It's as "known" as any IP is outside of the rare few that cross over into full mainstream awareness (which rarely translates into significant extra sales anyway, making it almost meaningless regardless).

Saying it's not GTA really isn't a fair comparison, since no franchise currently exists that sells like GTA does (not even CoD). In the entire history of video games, there are precisely two games that have sold better than GTAV.

RDR2 will do just fine in terms of sales. The only major factor that's going to reduce its numbers is Rockstar refusing to release a PC version - though it won't put enough of a dent that it's going to look like anything other than a massive success. Rockstar's going to be very, very happy with how the game sells.



aHappySacka posted...

Well the thing about microtransactions is that you don't have to buy them, and as long as you they don't inhib gameplay like what EA pulled then I don't see the issue.

The problem is that, in far too many cases these days, you DO have to buy them. Or you have to accept that the game you want to play is an absolutely broken piece of shit that has been deliberately designed to fuck you until you pay it real money to stop fucking you.

Yes, EA was guilty of it with Battlefront, but Warner Bros basically ruined Shadow of War by designing the entire endgame around forced grind to "encourage" (ie, extort) players into buying microtransactions. The same is true of a number of other games, which became even more obvious when developers had to readjust mechanics to compensate after removing loot boxes (much like Diablo III had to be radically altered after they removed the real money Auction House).

The endless proliferation of escalating DLC content in GTA:Online (designed specifically to encourage players to buy Shark cards with real money) has made multiplayer almost unplayable, as every new car requires either dozens of hours worth of monotonous grinding or tens of dollars of real world cash. And other players running around with untargetable jets and orbital cannons makes freeroam absolute shit. Which is part of why some people are terrified of microtransactions in RDR - they probably won't have any effect on singleplayer (which is the best part of RDR anyway), but even that's an assumption we can't be entirely sure of. But even if it's true, microtransactions may still absolutely ruin whatever worthwhile experience might otherwise have been in the multiplayer side of things, if they run amok the way they did with GTA.

Plus, being able to milk players so hard in GTA:O led to Rockstar dropping their plans for single-player DLC (a la Lost and the Damned or Ballad of Gay Tony for GTA IV), which pissed a LOT of people off. It would suck if RDR2 lost potential extra single-player story content so they could sell solid-gold horses in multiplayer.

In a perfect world, microtransactions SHOULD be limited to cosmetic-only, and you should be able to buy whatever skins or outfits you want without having to gamble for them. But we don't really live in that world right now. Developers have more than realized that artificially handicapping players in games absolutely encourages a portion of them to spend vast sums of money "fixing" you deliberate flaws, even if it makes the overall experience worse for pretty much everyone, and doubly so for people who refuse to spend money on microtransactions at all.


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