In the numbers analysis, let's not forget that Evolution also made all the WRC games for Sony, which may or may not have helped the argument to keep them. (WRC was a staple of the PS2 era and had PSP version, all good but I don't know how sales were for that in Europe besides good enough to keep going, and in America the franchise wasn't even worth Sony publishing most of the releases.) If sales were anywhere near flat for 15 years of Evolution Studios products with two spikes in new-IP launches, that would have been an even more damning indicator than the more recent Motorstorm data or the one year they got for DriveClub.
The closure of Evolution was not a surprise even to the staff at Evolution, so whatever numbers they had (more than we can assemble here, being how secretive publishers are with their product sales unless they're blockbusters,) those numbers were part of the writing on the wall.
Amid the great Driveclub U-turn the future looked bleak for many of the people at Evolution Studios.Staff at the Runcor…
www.eurogamer.net
Evolution had good tech, so it's disappointing that Sony couldn't keep a segment of the company as a engineering support studio. (I'm unfortunately in the camp of not loving MotorStorm due to its handling and AI, but I do respect its fans for keeping it alive; DriveClub, I never played, but it's not really my style.)
(Sony also dropped BigBig Studios, the Evolution sister studio who made PSP and Vita games, most notably MotorStorm Artic Edge, and they suffered in that same downturn period with no game. I miss BigBig, their MotorStorm was the one I liked the most and their PSP series Pursuit Force was silly fun.)
The thing is, the market for driving games stalled badly after the golden era of PS2/Xbox/Cube hits. Now,
arcade racers seem almost off the map except for Mario Kart. Established franchises like Burnout, GRID/DIRT, Project Cars, Midnight Club, Ridge Racer, and The Crew lost speed and sometimes conked out out completely in the PS3/360 and especially PS4/One eras. Need for Speed fell so far after owning the podium for so long that EA is closing developer Ghost Games, hoping that Criterion is still strong enough to save the franchise. Even Gran Turismo wasn't moving copies like it used to, although GT Sport has quietly sustained sales over its generation.
If you were to ask last year why nobody is making a triple-A racing game when so much money is being left on the table, most people would question if there really was money there to be had with so much failure and disinterest in the genre...
The lone success story was probably
Forza Horizon, which apparently beat GT Sport and was always a big deal to the Xbox fanbase. FH5 having the runaway success it is enjoying is still something of a surprise (timing is
perfect for it, with peak desperation for high-end software on next-gen consoles and Halo still a while away from stealing anybody's thunder, but even so, FH5 is a freight train,) and it certainly thumbs its nose at all the doubters who said racing was dead, but then again, DIRT 5 (by much of the MotorStorm team, BTW,) wasn't nearly this phenomenon (albeit enough for the developers to call online engagement "
shockingly huge", maybe eventually we'll see some numbers.) Nobody's done anything close to what Forza Horizon 5 is doing as a racing game for decades. Microsoft fostered its Foza line for all this time as a centerpiece of the Xbox brand, and it has paid off. We'll see when Test Drive and when NFS is rebuilt and if/when there is The Crew 3 if it's just the Forza Horizon magic (FM7 will also test that) or if racing gaming really is back on track.
The first Motorstorm sold a lot mainly because it was bundled with the PS3 SKU which had backwards compatibility (for $500, after the introduction of the non-BC $400 PS3).
All their subsequent games either seemingly flopped or disappointed though.
the part he left out was that DriveClub was HEAVILY bundled in Europe. Yoked to hard to find PS4 consoles that contributed to a large part of the 2 million unit sales he cites.
Sony was fully aware of that, and that probably played a big role in them greenlighting the closure of Evolution Studios.
I wonder if DriveClub's numbers also include the VR version? 2M for DriveClub seems surprisingly over expectations.
(Forced-bundling of the hardware launch makes sense, unfortunately. I know that's how I got MotorStorm for my PS3; not sure what the case was with DriveClub out of my area. 2M feels like it was worth recovering from the disastrous launch, but Sony could also have kept track of DLC sales and been able to tell if the franchise was viable.)