• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Kotaku UK Rumor: Xbox One, Windows 10, Halo 5, & Minecraft notably below expectations

Status
Not open for further replies.

Cyclone

Member
It was ~5M at 3 months.

I have no idea what mathcamp bro is attending.

Fantastic news being a big fan (GT: Kilo Five add me for Arena). I was legitimately worried the budget for future games was going to be decreased.

What about uh... 6 month #'s? :) Around 7 million? Higher/lower? #Bravopls
 
Well, if you'd like folks to take what you post seriously you should probably care about the claims they contain. When you assert something requiring insider info you shouldn't be shocked when someone else asks for the receipts. Alternatively, consider instead just stating that your impression is that it didn't meet expectations, etc. Not complicated.

And they gave you another entire game completely for free along with other small items as a mea culpa.



Or their playtesting wasn't up to date on how the network for XBL worked, in which case they were entirely unaware of any issue. Pretty sure I recall Frankie or someone else alluding to that at some point.

Um...

maybe that's something they should have double checked before shipping their biggest exclusive of holiday 2014

This.

That aside, glad halo 5 did well. That and titanfall are the only shooters I can stand at the moment. Hopefully, they don't take the piss on BTB come halo 6 though.
 

AHA-Lambda

Member
I wonder why Halo undersold? :/

The campaign was trash but the MP was well received yeah? And the XB1 install base is ahead of 360 at this point in the life cycle yeah?
Wonder why people just abandoned Halo :/
 

TBiddy

Member
I wonder why Halo undersold? :/

The campaign was trash but the MP was well received yeah? And the XB1 install base is ahead of 360 at this point in the life cycle yeah?
Wonder why people just abandoned Halo :/

You should read the thread - or at least the posts made by Stinkles. Around 5 million copies after 3 months is pretty damn good with an install base around 20 million.
 

Cyclone

Member
So why is it being said to have undersold then?

Well technically it is underselling slightly compared to past Halo games. When a franchise has a game like Halo 3 in its past, hard to top those sales. Also people are stupid and will take anything as verified news in order to fulfill their bias.
 

Mooreberg

Member
Five million after three months is really impressive. I think even hitting 75% of Halo 3's sales would be impressive for a few reasons:

01. Relative market position. Halo 3 was the most heavily marketed exclusive on 360, at a time when it was outselling PS3 easily in the West.

02. More competition. COD was two months away from blowing up when Halo 3 came out. Nobody cared about Battlefield on consoles back then. There was no Destiny or Overwatch.

03. Everbody charges for online play now, and I am not sure how many multi-platform owners maintain subscriptions for both. If you mostly play online through PSN, stuff like Halo 5 is Gamefly material since you can beat it over a weekend.

Gears will be interesting because there is way, way more to choose from for co-op shooters than when Horde Mode made its debut. I am not sure it has as much pull as Halo for keeping people as XBL Gold subscribers.
 
So why is it being said to have undersold then?

Because Halo should be bigger. It's Microsoft's flagship game. They have a lot invested. Hell, they started a new development studio specifically for Halo. In three years, we'll be seeing three different Halo releases and Halo 5 still not selling as well as Halo 3 despite the Xbox One doing better than the 360 at this point in time. Yeah, it means it undersold.
 

mo60

Member
Because Halo should be bigger. It's Microsoft's flagship game. They have a lot invested. Hell, they started a new development studio specifically for Halo. In three years, we'll be seeing three different Halo releases and Halo 5 still not selling as well as Halo 3 despite the Xbox One doing better than the 360 at this point in time. Yeah, it means it undersold.

Halo 5 was never going to sell as much as halo 3 did in the same period of time.
 

c0de

Member
Because the 5 million is almost guaranteed to be a shipped number and people are thinking it means sold.

That's not a reason for undersold. This would mean that 5 million is good and everything below that would have to be considered undersold (in 3 months) which we don't know. What people believe when it comes to sales data is a topic of its own.
 
That's not a reason for undersold. This would mean that 5 million is good and everything below that would have to be considered undersold (in 3 months) which we don't know. What people believe when it comes to sales data is a topic of its own.

I'm not going to tell anyone what metrics they should use to see if a title was a success sales wise.

I'm just pointing out that 5 million was shipped and the game was overshipped heavily. Which actually falls in line with this thread and how H5 is notably below expectations.
 

Trup1aya

Member
So why is it being said to have undersold then?

I think we need to consider the source here. This is an ex-lionhead employee speaking on why his former studio was closed. And dissapointment at several MS studio's + a shrinking opportunity on Win10 is allegedly what lead to Spencer needing to present SOMETHING to the chop block.

Then we also need to consider what MS expectations might have been. I remember back in the November NPD folks were saying that MS was expecting Halo 5 to sell like Halo 3 and 4 at launch... Which seems unreasonably lofty for even a massive fan of the series, given the environment those 2 games were launching into. It's hard for me to believe that a company with the analytical resources MS has access to would bank on such projections (Quick H4 drop off, disastrous MCC launch, low xb1 installed base, lack of H3-like hype surrounding franchise). All data showed interest in Halo falling since Reach- But I suppose it's possible they were this off...

Still though, it seems like whoever is the source of this article is spreading the blame for Lionheads closure. Poor management + other underperforming studios + underperforming Win10 + expensive mediocre Lionheads game = MS needing to close SOMETHING. Lionheads was that something, yet Halo 5 gets a mention.
 

John Harker

Definitely doesn't make things up as he goes along.
I was saying for months Halo 5 was way below expectations by them. So no rumor on that part!
 

Cyclone

Member
If the 5 million copies of Halo 5 weren't sold to consumers, then it doesn't mean anything.

Stinkles replied to someone saying it sold X amount of copies. So he means sold.

Why can't people just accept Halo 5 sold well, albeit a little underneath past games numbers? 'H5 is only at 2.5 mil copies' is now a myth. Thank God.
 
High profile dev went out of his way to share numbers, and people are trying as hard as they can to discredit him. Out of no evidence but their own agenda/assumptions simply because it doesn't fit their vision.

What a bloody unbelievable place this has become.
 
Stinkles replied to someone saying it sold X amount of copies. So he means sold.

But he didn't quite clarify whatever it was sold to consumers or shipped to retailers.

All he said was 5 million in three months; That's it. But maybe you're right on this one.
 
I'm assuming Frankies numbers are retail shipped.

It would be really strange to combine digital sales with retail shipped to provide one number.

It would be strange to say how many copies the game has sold in total when people were questioning if it took 3 months to do a million?

Does digital not going or something? Strange indeed lol
 

c0de

Member
High profile dev went out of his way to share numbers, and people are trying as hard as they can to discredit him. Out of no evidence but their own agenda/assumptions simply because it doesn't fit their vision.

What a bloody unbelievable place this has become.

Halo is one of the last pillars that is to fall to finally put a nail in the coffin that the Xbox belongs to. Said nobody ever, of course.
 

Matt

Member
All of this is true, as far as I know.

I would even say Xbox being at half of their projections is generous, rather than conservative.
 

c0de

Member
All of this is true, as far as I know.

I would even say Xbox being at half of their projections is generous, rather than conservative.

From when were these projections? And --v to "as far as I know." please. How much detail do devs in general get about these sort of things?
I mean, I remember when this gen didn't even start that MS expected that the whole console business would increase in size significantly and seeing the Xbone as a living room device for a broader audience and tv-stuff, I think that when Mattrick was in charge, they really expected the bone to sell immensely (of course also because of the kinect sales last gen) but I would think that a reasonable mind would've adjusted the projections very, very fast.
 

Mendrox

Member
Maybe it didn't sell because Halo is tired as fuck?

This? I also don't believe that 5 millionen copies have been sold sadly. Do people even play Halo anymore? I quit Halo after the Halo 4 (horrible, horrible...). I also know nobody here in Germany that has a Xbox One. You can also get one at the moment for about 230 Euros including RotTR, Quantum Break, Xbox Live, Headset and more.

I loved my 360 - what happened? :(
 
but I would think that a reasonable mind would've adjusted the projections very, very fast.

Product and investment roadmap are 3-5 years minimum, even in companies where turnaround of products are 2 years, not 4-5.

Forecast are of course, very quickly revised. But it's difficult to suddenly scale everything down in the short term if you set up business structure and investment based off a certain assumptions .
 

c0de

Member
Product and investment roadmap are 3-5 years minimum, even in companies where turnaround of products are 2 years, not 4-5.

You can't say that in general as it varies from company to company.
I think no one at MS has projections for the bone to do anything near 100 million consoles (or 80) since at least 1 year.
 

Cranster

Banned
LOL, here we go with this shit. What do you think this is, GameFAQ's, N4G or The Vestibule from IGN?
Because in every gaming side thread topic related to Halo, people are always shitting over it and making up theories on how it's failing. You don't like how it plays? You don't like the story direction? You hate how MCC was and still is sort of broken?That's fine, but trying to put words in a 343 Industries employees mouth and pulling sales figures out of thin air just reeks of pure fanboyism in my eyes.
 

TBiddy

Member
Because in every gaming side thread topic related to Halo people are always shitting over it and making up theories on how it's failing.

To be fair, that goes for most big games. There's always someone trying their hardest to spin anything in a bad light.
 
Because in every gaming side thread topic related to Halo, people are always shitting over it and making up theories on how it's failing. You don't like how it plays? You don't like the story direction? You hate how MCC was and still is sort of broken? That's fine, but trying to put words in a 343 Industries employees mouth and pulling sales figures out of thin air just reeks of pure fanboyism in my eyes.

Please point out where I did that, please. All I wondered is whatever the 5 million copies of the game were sold to consumers or shipped to retailers.

If he were to clearly say one of the two, then I would've been fine with that. It's not that complicated.
 

Roshin

Member
I think the Xbox division once Spencer took over has done the best it can to win fans over and try to get dump over the hump that they were in. But the shit hole Mattrick put them in maybe to deep to climb out of.

Don Mattrick didn't act or work alone on this. Phil was involved too, but it seems like a lot of people want to forget that.
 
Don Mattrick didn't act or work alone on this. Phil was involved too, but it seems like a lot of people want to forget that.

Yeah I don't understand people claiming spencer is the 2nd coming of Christ and will fix all of Xbox problems. He was a key decision maker too for the original vision
 
You can't say that in general as it varies from company to company.
I think no one at MS has projections for the bone to do anything near 100 million consoles (or 80) since at least 1 year.

That is what people call "revised forecast"

But anything that was set up in 2013 was set up with higher projections.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom