Hellsing321
Member
Sad but expected. Hope Insomniac can absorb this loss without have to fire people, but it seems that one bomb is all it takes nowadays to cripple a studio.
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FUSE Bombs in UK, #37 in charts in debut week
- Thread starter Miles Quaritch
- Start date
StevePharma
Member
Yeah marketing in NL was and will probably be pretty non-existent. I don't think a hugely expensive Blur-trailer will change that though.
UnblessedSoul
Member
I liked their first reveal, it had promise and felt different from the other shooters out there, then they changed it and I just lost interest, the boxart is awful don't know why they greenlighted that, plus being late in the cycle to launch new IPs is risky if you dont get it right, partnering with EA was a very bad idea though, coupled with very little advertisement and that is your result, not surprised but I like IG and hope they learn from this.
Black Door
Banned
They no longer develop exclusively for Sony so now they're second rate, huh
No, I just don't remember reading that their games charted high or did well sale number wise (R3 180k first month in the US for an example) and was just asking a legit question.
GlamFM
Banned
Pretty good & pretty solid isn't good enough anymore.
Do we even get much advertisement over here for any games other than the big blockbusters (WoW/CoD/BF/AC)? I rarely notice game ads on TV.
I think people generally hate R2 because Insomniac took everything people loved about the original, threw it out the window and Call of Duty-fied it. I mean out of any multiplayer game Resistance got the most time logged from me and I couldn't even stand to play R2 online. I thought the pacing of the story was bad as well and I hated the move away from the WW2 styled color palate. If any game felt right with the gray palate it was the Resistance franchise because it made me feel like I was back in that error.
It can't be that bad.
jstevenson
Sailor Stevenson
Lots of inaccuracies here. EA Partners is largely what you make of it and how you negotiate your deal with them. That probably varies a lot from deal to deal and game to game (see Valve's distribution with them vs. something like us which is more full on publishing of our game etc).
PIMPBYBLUD
Member
Well that was a short fuse.... >>
Well it must've expected, surely? British GAFfer here, the only thing that matters here is the annual CoD and FIFA, lots of Battlefield fans too. Only games that get a marketing push get many sales here, stuff like Far Cry 3 and Skyrim, but not many other games get talked about. You see far more Samsung and Apple ads on TV nowadays.
StevePharma
Member
No, you're right. Maybe on the music channels and Comedy Central (youth centric) at the most on TV. Oh and during Champions League of course (Sony).
There are big ads on tv,i have seen them. Well i have seen Crysis 3 and also CoD/WoW/BF/AC. Mostly on Veronica or Comedy Central are game commericals or MTV since gamekings is there. But not on my channels on the dutch tv.
ProfessorMoran
Member
Regardless, this EA Partners venture is a total failure for you guys, so where do you go from here? The IP, even if you own it, is pretty useless to you now.
yankeehater
Member
R1 had an amazing SP, and R2 had bad SP but amazing MP and Co-op, and R3 had really good SP and MP. R3 is definitely the most well balanced of the Resistance games, really sad that the franchise has to end like that. I would love to see what they could have done with nextgen hardware.
zomgbbqftw
Banned
Then why did you allow EA to market and promote the game so poorly? The only successful games from EAP have been Valve ones and they took charge of everything bar distribution and production.
I don't think that's how it works.
You're suggesting Insomniac should have taken the marketing into their own hands? That seems so risky and silly. I don't think dumping their own money into marketing was the solution to the problem.
yankeehater
Member
I would think any marketing would have been better then no marketing at all.
The_Darkest_Red
Member
I even loved the campaign in R2, but that might be because I played R2 before Fall of Man. It seems like most of the hate for R2's campaign comes from fans of the original who were upset with some of the changes.
But yeah, a new Resistance on PS4/XBO could have been incredible. I agree with you on R3's MP as well, it was a lot of fun and didn't get half the attention it deserved.
Treechopper
Member
We all saw this coming but it still hurts. I only know one friend who has this game and the rest don't even know it exists.
It's a huge shame too as this game gets better every time I play it. The demo was lukewarm but the full game is great.
It's a huge shame too as this game gets better every time I play it. The demo was lukewarm but the full game is great.
Heart Attack
Member
Whoever was in charge of marketing, either EA or Insomniac, i gotta admit they were pretty smart. Better save $10-15 million, than spend them on this turd for a few thousand more sold units.
I disagree, I think it would have been a complete waste of money. I don't believe the increased sales would have made up the money to further advertise the game.
In hindsight, I think EA gave the game as much attention as it deserved and they did the right thing to ignore it.
If Insomniac had taken the marketing budget completely out of their own pockets I can't imagine that going well for them.
Given that EA has a proven track record of doing little to no advertising for EAP games, instead just releasing them to little fanfare and letting them die on the shelf, I think Insomniac would have been foolish to leave advertising to EA.
With a better game than Fuse, maybe.
Alice and other EAP games deserved better, Fuse got what it deserved.
zomgbbqftw
Banned
Well James Stevenson is suggesting that EAP doesn't work in the way I'm suggesting, which is deals done with different independent developers with the minimum base support being distribution and publishing and then depending on how bad EA want you then they can give you stuff like marketing and promotional help. If he is saying that's wrong (which I'm sceptical about, sorry James), and EAP are responsible for everything except where the developer opts out then IG needed to ensure that EA marketed the game properly which they haven't.
As for IG doing the marketing themselves, yes I agree, the product was not marketable, and it would have been good money after bad. That's why I think it didn't get any marketing, IG management probably didn't feel it was worth wasting funds on. Better to just let it die and regroup rather than wasting more money.
Ya, I completely agree with your second paragraph. That was the point I was trying to make.
I don't think Insomniac had much direct control over what EA did or did not do with the marketing, but I'm certainly not coming from a position of knowledge or anything, just my uninformed gamer opinion.
yankeehater
Member
If IG really wants to make this a franchise then they needed to take a loss on it to try to build up the brand. They already had a bunch of factors against them, like releasing a new IP so late late in a gen, they had to get as many people as possible to play it and hope that word of mouth was good and got the brand awareness up so that when they put the next game out it could do well. A new IP was not going to sell well now unless it is super well reviewed and crazy hyped, and even then it is still a big risk. I think once they decided to release now they should have been willing to throw some marketing money at it.
something fishy
Member
True that, even a fairly average game can do well early on when exclusive. I mean it wasn't terrible but taken away from being one of the few big games at launch and it wasn't that special at all.
Yeah, Alice 2 is a fantastic game, in a genre that is seriously underrepresented on the HD twins, especially 360.
SotD is a hard sell, it's six hours long, there is no reason to ever play it more than once, and it's very bizarre, that was always going to be a very small audience, but Alice 2 should have been bigger.
Whitebison
Member
I feel bad for Insomniac but what were they thinking? c'mon...
That's a hard factor to quantify. I would say that most people would agree that it did, although to what degree will probably vary greatly.
I'm sure some people think the rebranding is almost single-handedly responsible for killing interest in the game and some probably think it was rather inconsequential.
I'm somewhere in the middle, I don't think it's the entire reason the game flopped, but it is certainly a large part of it. I think if Fuse was a better game, then the "OverStrike Factor" would have been almost completely forgotten about after release.
The fact that we're talking about OverStrike AFTER Fuse has been released means that the rebranding was a complete failure.
Gamers wanted OverStrike, but would have accepted a good Fuse. Instead we got a mediocre Fuse, so we still want OverStrike.
Diddy Kong
Banned
There is NO WAY a shift in art direction midway through development and a name change would've had any real impact on the quality of the game.
If the mechanics of the game or the characters/story were solid, we'd feel way differently, but odds are those things were set in stone earlier on in the dev process.
I think people are spending too much time wringing their hands about what could've been, trying to blame EA rather than holding Insomniac more accountable for how lackluster this turned out to be.
If the mechanics of the game or the characters/story were solid, we'd feel way differently, but odds are those things were set in stone earlier on in the dev process.
I think people are spending too much time wringing their hands about what could've been, trying to blame EA rather than holding Insomniac more accountable for how lackluster this turned out to be.
I understand, though, it's hard to admit that Insomniac fucked up.
I grew up playing Spyro on PS1 and Ratchet on PS2. Coming from the position of a long-time fan, it's easier to just blame EA than accept the reality that it's both of their faults and the quality of the final product lies with Insomniac.
Dark Rider
Member
well Insomniac this is EA for you, especially the lack of ads
and focus testing to hell and back is doing it too much it ruins the game.
and focus testing to hell and back is doing it too much it ruins the game.
SuperSonic1305
Member
Did you miss the hate R2 got?
i think they were already used to that with sony!
Fuse isn't a medicore game though. It suffers from an identity crisis more than anything and feels like a mish mash but the core gameplay is really rather good IMO. It's also a proper coop game in that the weapons that each player has compliments each other too and can work together for added effect.
Steve McQueen
Member
Come on Pachter, even I saw this coming.
R2 probably wouldn't have been hated as much as it was if Fall of Man wasn't so loved. That game is still one of the best single and multiplayer experiences of this gen for me
semiconscious
Member
amen...
i've experienced as much pure fun playing the ratchet & clank games as i have any other. the series has become my #1 source for 'what to replay while i wait for something new' gaming, & the graphic designs, frantic gameplay, & humor are, for me, unique & unsurpassed by any other developer. when insomniac's been on, they've nailed what, imo, gaming bliss's really all about. & i wouldn't wanna consider a 'future of gaming' that didn't include them...