You’re right but I think it might be relevant for retention? If they retain 10% of players 500k vs 5 mill sales makes the player base size quite different.
Comment on Crimson Desert sales top five million
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
[deleted]
nyctre@piefed.social 3 months ago
steel_for_humans@piefed.social 3 months ago
Why are you talking about player retention in context of a single player game? Perhaps you mixed it with their previous game — Black Desert – which is an MMO.
nyctre@piefed.social 3 months ago
Oh crap. I didn’t mix them up, I did assume, however. Wasn’t expecting it to be single player. I thought I was basically black desert 2. My bad
steel_for_humans@piefed.social 3 months ago
It technically started as an MMO. That was their initial idea, but after they started development, they changed direction. That shows in the game to some extent, because the quests are kinda scattered and there is not always linearity, sometimes you get quests out of nowhere which doesn’t make sense. There are some short fedex type quests or tasks, too, but at the same time playing Crimson Desert does not feel like a single player MMO. Exploration is *fantastic*, but you should know that this game doesn’t hold your hand. You are tree to do whatever and to discover the mechanics on your own. There are puzzles with no explanation whatsoever. Sometimes you’ll stumble on some hidden area with an environmental puzzle and no idea what to do. The last game like that was last year’s Hell is Us (a highly recommended hidden gem). Crimson Desert is just *fun*.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
[deleted]nyctre@piefed.social 3 months ago
Oh, yeah, I definitely agree. A high retention rate is obviously preferable but at such high sales numbers, I’m sure many of them are only gonna be there for a short while. I’m pretty sure not even WoW can retain so many people anymore.
Steam reviews are fairly positive, which is a good sign but I guess it remains to be seen how many will still be playing in a month or two. And how many will be back for the first content patches.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 months ago
But where’s the marketing? Where’s the established franchise to coast upon? Where’s the developer reputation to guarantee sales? Pearl Abyss is a pretty much unknown developer, Crimson desert is a new IP and the only marketing I’ve seen is essentially word of mouth. For a game to organically sell 5 million units is a pretty big deal.
Jax@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I wouldn’t call Pearl Abyss an unknown developer, at least not in the mmo scene.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 months ago
Just because the space Sim crowd knows who Frontier Developments is doesn’t mean the rest of the gaming space knows who they are. Pearl abyss may be known in the niche they were in before but they’ve made a game with mainstream appeal and for many people Pearl Abyss is a name they’re hearing for the first time.
Jax@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Yet if you’d said Elite Dangerous it would be much more recognizeable, just like BDO is with Pearl Abyss.
Plus, Pearl Abyss has been working to get people to play their game for quite some time — Shroud played it for a bit and I know some other popular mmo streamers played it. All of this to say, Crimson Desert’s success is not wild — and using Marathon as a metric is just the worst thing you could do because Pearl Abyss hasn’t been shitting themselves reputation-wise.
64bithero@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Speaking of lack of marketing did anyone else think was an MMO ? For a long time I thought it was a sequel to Black Desert or a big expansion. I just found out a few months ago it’s a single player game
Ashen44@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
I just found out literally with this post lmao
thethrilloftime69@feddit.online 3 months ago
My YouTube feed has a million videos on this game. Every major media outlet has done multiple videos on this game and the bugs and the launch. I’m pretty plugged into the games industry and I hadn’t heard of it until it launched but since then it has gotten a ton of press and I doubt it’s just “word of mouth”.
absquatulate@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Word of mouth my ass. Heard absolutely nothing about this game for years and then suddenly a few weeks before launch ( and even now) reddit and youtube absolutely exploded in “can’t wait for this!” and “this is the greatest game ever!” posts. To me that smells of astroturfing. I don’t doubt it’s a good game and might pick it up when/if they drop denuvo, but it was definitely not “organic”
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 months ago
You can argue everything before launch wasn’t organic if you want to, I don’t care enough to argue over your cynicism, but post-launch it has been organic. If the game was a steaming pile of shit none of the before release “astroturfing” would matter a month after release, the game would have a player count nosedive like Highguard and it would be what people consider “a dead game”. But it’s not having that nose-dive, it has a fairly small decay considering last sunday peak playercount was almost the same as the first peak after launch. Furthermore the reviews have gone from mixed at launch to very positive. Those things don’t happen when the hype is manufactured.
People aren’t making Youtube videos on Crimson Desert combos or puzzle solving videos or why you should engage with the camp management system or etc because Pearl Abyss is paying them, the videos get made because people want to make those videos and talk about the game. You don’t get a RDR2 artist glazing the water simulation (which BTW is a video I very much recommend watching because it’s a nerd nerding out about nerdy things and IMO those are always the best videos) unless there’s something to glaze, Pearl Abyss isn’t going to pay their competition to glaze them.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 3 months ago
It’s totally astroturfed. I never heard of this game until two days before release, and most comments about it are “it’s good if you ignore the story and gameplay”.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 3 months ago
They did a pretty significant marketing push on Twitch for Crimson Desert, but in financial terms I don’t know if that is all that expensive, and certainly not in relation to 5 million copies sold.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 months ago
Marketing doesn’t guarantee 5 million sales. Just look at Marathon. Insane marketing push for a game made by a beloved studio sold only 1.2 million units. And the marketing was excellent, clearly better than the game itself. This is a piece of art.
Jax@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Well, Marathon is a supremely bad example as Bungie has been doing everything they can to make the people who have supported them throughout Destiny hate them.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 months ago
Isn’t this game a spiritual successor to Black Desert Online made by the same dev?
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 months ago
The answer is kinda yes and no but more towards no because it was conceived as a successor to Black Desert and was originally set as a prequel to Black Desert but during development it became its own universe and the final product isn’t even in the same genre as Black Desert. But like Dark Souls isn’t in the same universe as Demons souls either and is still a spiritual successor if you want to consider Crimson Desert as a sort of a single-player successor to Black Desert online I guess that’s probably somewhat true. I can’t really say because I’ve never played Black Desert Online. For me personally MMO vs single-player is a big enough difference to not consider it a successor.