Highlights:
And here's a snippet quote, though there's a lot more at the link. There will also be a separate thread on their other plans as detailed in the article.
- Song of the Deep sold way above expectations. It was 28% above their highest forecasts with physical sales, and way above that level of overperformance on the digital side.
- The toys are also above expectations, and have a notably higher attach rates than most games (12-14% instead of 7-8%).
- They also talk about how they did a lot of partnerships for things like a middle-school level book with Barnes and Noble, and how the game and book helped sell a lot of copies of each other.
- There is some talk about how they work with their individual store managers to really help promote the product and make them personally excited for the game with demos and presentations and the like.
- GameStop talks about how they want to keep working with all their partners long term, so you can probably expect either Song of the Deep 2, or another game between Insomniac and GameStop.
And here's a snippet quote, though there's a lot more at the link. There will also be a separate thread on their other plans as detailed in the article.
Source: http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/25/how-gamestop-is-faring-as-a-video-game-publisher/GameStop said:GB: Did you guys ever announce how well it did?
Stanley: We don't specify units, but from a physical perspective it overachieved in our first three months of launch. It beat our wildest forecasts by 28 percent on the physical side. On the digital side it did way more than that. One piece that also surprised us was the attach on the collectibles. We knew there was a high risk on collectibles, especially for an unknown IP. You can imagine the investment that goes into manufacturing and so on. Traditional attach rates on collectibles for triple-A IPs are around seven to eight percent. Song of the Deep was tracking 12 to 14 percent, which is interesting data. We're on to something there. We're still learning exactly what it is, but our gut feel that we could allow people to explore a new IP and have a relationship through collectibles and limited edition runs of products—we're certainly going to explore that with future games.
Price point was a good learning area too. This was a $15 game. Being able to go out there with a physical $15 game and a digital $15 game was interesting from a retail perspective. Not too many games go out there at $15. It's certainly economically challenging to go out with a $15 game, but we made it work. On the digital side, it was a very welcome price point, especially because what gamers received was probably more like a $24-29 value.