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Prey's debut sales in the UK seem quite low

Instro

Member
I would imagine the only place it has a chance of doing well is on PC right now. They definitely screwed up showing off the game correctly, and the demo didn't seem to help either considering thr input lag issues on PS4. It's unfortunate because it is GotY material without a doubt.
 

Ganondolf

Member
I expect prey was a low budget game and with almost no advertising Bethesda must be expecting lowish sales.

Maybe 1-1.5m sales will be enough to be considered a success for this game.
 

Zukkoyaki

Member
No idea where the whole zero marketing statements are coming from. Prey was all over the internet with ads running constantly on places like YouTube and IGN, had a constant flow of trailers and gameplay videos, was at nearly every PAX and industry event in the past 8 or so months, and even had a proper demo which is rare these days. I've even seen some commercials. It pains me to say it but maybe games like this just don't sell very well (though I hear the demo was pretty meh).

As far as the whole name and Prey 2 controversies go, nobody knows or cares about those aside from a few thousand nerds on the internet. I don't mean this in a condescending way, it's just enthusiast crowds online tend to overrate their importance.
 
Game is absolutely brilliant, from the twelve or so hours I've played so far. I honestly never expected too much from it, but it's a legit System Shock successor and a fantastic immersive sim.
 

Dysun

Member
No reviews seems to have handicapped launch enthusiasm around the game, especially since it seems to be of high quality.
 
What are these good publishers that would allocate a decent budget for an immersive sim?

You're asking the wrong question.

What are these good publishers that would allocate a decent budget for a great reviewing immersive sim and not advertise it at all?

Only Bethesda probably.
 

OBias

Member
The hell is a immersive simulator?

I thought Prey 2/reboot was a first person shooter.

An open-ended FPS/RPG hybrid with certain properties. You are seeing the world from the eyes of the player character most of the time with very little interruption for external camera cutscenes, almost every game object is bound by the same believable rules (like ragdoll physics), and you deal with problems instead of rigid puzzles where you can have multiple solutions.
 

OBias

Member
You're asking the wrong question.

What are these good publishers that would allocate a decent budget for a great reviewing immersive sim and not advertise it at all?

Only Bethesda probably.

Without Bethesda the game would not even exist. There would have been nothing to advertise.
 

farting

Banned
it was constantly advertised on SyFy in the uk but that's a sky/virgin channel which i doubt has a big audience. a few hundred thousand maybe
 

Nimby

Banned
it was constantly advertised on SyFy in the uk but that's a sky/virgin channel which i doubt has a big audience. a few hundred thousand maybe

I've seen it on Twitch a lot, but it never mentioned the release date which I found pretty weird.
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
It is a splendid homage to Looking Glass studios work. Then again it's its own respectable IP. Having a science fiction game told in space with zero gravity is such a pallet cleanser.

Well, that is at least what I believe. Is System Shock 3 going to sell more? Who knows. My guess is that a handful of gamers get the draw of what it is and others it doesn't matter. Maybe there's not enough hand AAA in there or they aren't seeing what made games like this so great in the first place.
 

takoyaki

Member
Well I'm waiting for reviews so this is what Bethesda wanted right?

Same here, there's enough great games out right now that I didn't get it day one before any reviews were published.

Now that it has reviewed well and GAF seems to like it, I ordered a copy this morning and even saved some money compared to getting it day one.
 

Shredderi

Member
It really doesn't seem like they put much thought and effort into advertising this, and I'm genuinely wondering why? They pump millions into a game like this and it honestly feel like the publisher is in a meeting, bored, not giving a shit, being like "yeah yeah you can do the game*yawn*". I can't imagine the people funding this being in their meeting rooms, excited and intensely discussing how to proceed with the game, putting in effort and thought. This is nonsensical but it almost seems like they're like "Yeah the game is gonna bomb and who cares, we can just say that it proves that we should move on from singleplayer games into more mp/service type games".

It almost feels like I could have taken my buddy and generated more hype for the game if we did it as a full time job. That too is a stupid thing to say because marketing is hard but I'm an enthusiast and even I could barely feel the presence of the game leading up to it's launch.
 
I feel really bad for Arkane. They are putting out really high quality single player narrative AAA games and both this and D2 underperformed.

It's a damn shame and I can't help but worry for the studio
 

OKK

Member
Generally speaking, marketing is spent as a percentage of expected sales (10% to 15% frequently).
Interesting. What kind of timeframe are we talking about? Is it expected sales for the first month?

Strangely, SteamSpy are reporting 112k owners of Prey:

https://steamspy.com/app/480490

Not sure how accurate that is, but as they've had 84k unique players in the last two weeks I'm going to assume it's not far off.

EDIT: wait that's global isn't it? My bad.
SteamSpy also shows geographical stats. If we are talking about owners, then 8.2% are from the UK. Although it's worth to mention that Galyonkin (the man behind the service) has said that the data is not very reliable with recently released games. It's best to wait few more days to have more accurate information.
 

Griss

Member
I had no idea the game was out. I kinda rely on review threads to help educate me on games. That policy may have hurt Bethesda here.

Jesus I just went to Metacritic and realised I had heard nothing about this game. I thought it was some kind of first person monster hunter game or something. How could a major publisher fail to get their message through like that to an enthusiast like me? I've always been up to speed on every previous Bethesda game.

And the shame is, having read about it, it actually sounds like something I'd really like.
 
What a shame, the game really is fan-fucking-tastic. It's easily the #1 or #2 best game I've played all year, and I'm one of those lunatics who somehow found the time to play everything from Zelda, Horizon, Nier and Nioh, to Night in the Woods, Edith Finch and Snake Pass.
 
The hell is a immersive simulator?

I thought Prey 2/reboot was a first person shooter.

It's a label for games using design principles inspired by old Looking Glass Studios games. I don't really understand why it's being used a genre label so much lately far more than it ever was in the past. I guess someone popularized the term fairly recently.

For an average gaming audience "immersive sim" doesn't easily describe a game.
It doesn't really do so for many people.
 
It's Arkane. One of the best current gaming studios. I'm pretty sure it would exist, just not called "Prey".

After the disappointing sales of Dishonored 2 I doubt this game would have existed without the name "Prey". You gotta keep in mind, Bethesda was probably looking at any opportunity to use that name to reboot the IP after the whole fiasco with Prey 2.
 

Retsudo

Member
I only saw a couple of ads in the Tube "Prey is Bioshock in space" or something like that. Other than that if i didnt follow game releases closely i'd have no idea it had come out.
 
It's Arkane. One of the best current gaming studios. I'm pretty sure it would exist, just not called "Prey".

Being a good gaming studio doesn't mean that anyone will want to fund your high budget niche game. Ask Obsidian about how hard it is to secure funding as an independent studio.

After the disappointing sales of Dishonored 2 I doubt this game would have existed without the name "Prey". You gotta keep in mind, Bethesda was probably looking at any opportunity to use that name to reboot the IP after the whole fiasco with Prey 2.
Dishonored 2 came out late last year, well after this game was in development.
 
........... So f**king depressed over this news -_-

The game is freaking GOOD... like serouisly the game is really really good, but of course with their stupid marketing plans for the game they can only blame themselves.

So what... now we won't get Dishonored 3 and Prey 2?

Arkane are the best FPS makers IMO and they don't deserves low sales as this for their games :(
 

J_Viper

Member
Smooth moves Bethesda. Holding back reviews has certainly been working out for you.

What a damn tragedy for Arkane. They deserve better.
 
Other than the marketing, is the early review copies issue really that big?

Dishonored 2 and this game seem to be great AAA games that are not getting enough attention because of marketing or hate because of the early review issue,. but why? They are good games and the faulty speaks for itself.

Makes me think for all the crap we speak, in the end it is just crap, as a game whose quality speaks for itself is getting neglected again.
 
It's a shame a good company like Arkane has to be the guinea pig for Bethesda's idiotic policies and marketing strategies.

At the end of the day, the game itself will be blamed for weak sales and nothing else.
 

Kouriozan

Member
No reviews copies before the game official launch policy was bound to bite them back one day or another.
Now, this game had no marketing nor hype at all in the mainstream media, a real shame.
 
You can't keep telling people they're not allowed to know whether a product is any good before it's available to buy and still expect the same level of excitement and enthusiasm to buy games sight unseen.

They've been training their audience to wait until after launch to buy their titles, and as much as I'm glad to see people actually learning and not still preordering with no guarantee of quality, when budgets are built on expectations of day one sales and the idiotic hype machine, they're just fucking themselves over with this refusal to let any influencers get to truly express the quality that these titles posses.
 
The most baffling thing about Bethesda's review policy is that all of thier games have been getting good reviews, doom/dishonored 2/prey/etc. there was no reason to do this. They should have at least waited for a game that wasnt shaping up before implementing this policy.

I know thier plan was "we didnt give out doom review copies and that game was great, so theres no reason to question any of our games" but they're only hurting themselves, prey looks like it really needed early review scores to generate excitement for the game.

This is a case where the suits are out thinking themselves.
 
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