Yeah, I knew the game was going to be a big mover. The discussion always came down to whether the hardware push was going to be a huge swell behind it or not. I was always curious, but I'd heard Halo mentioned as a major reason behind purchasing since the launch of the hardware. There's just been various smaller 'waves' of it, so to speak.
I guess that really depends. There's huge variances in the PS4 audiences. There's folks like me, that buy a lot of Japanese titles (Toukiden, DQH, Tales, etc) who don't really care about a lot of the major titles, but they buy pretty much every major Japanese release.
There's the much larger, and much more common audience of the sports/shooter audience, who gets the Maddens, the NBA, etc. These get less games overall each year, but they are a *huge* audience. Largest audience for games like Madden, CoD, and the upcoming Battlefront as well.
There's the folks I see as the fans of what Playstation brings to the table, in the sense of the more diverse titles, which is stuff like Until Dawn, and other first party titles that aren't anywhere near true mainstream, but sell well enough to get attention.
I mean, any mainstream title also is selling best on PS4 at this point. If it's multi-platform, we see the larger share going PS4, so take that how you will. I just break things down into smaller subsets of buying trends, I guess, based on common customer habits.
A lot of folks like MS's first party offerings, and have stated as much since the system was announced. There really wasn't much doubt as to which way they'd lean, just a matter of when it would be that they'd finally put their cash down, from my experience.
I have no idea how Gamestop or Walmart look at this point. I can only speak for Best Buy, but these trends weren't really something we did anything special to make happen. We saw almost instant reactions from the price drops. People referencing all kinds of value sites or 'price savvy' apps and segments on local news/kind of things calling attention to it. Parents mentioning getting purchases done before the chaos of Black Friday. It's been really interesting to see.
I do too. Wish Cornbread would offer some insight, and Shogun were still around.
I fully expect Halo 5 to be one of the most successful titles of the year, hands down. Won't beat CoD on the same platform, but it's already done fantastically well.
There's that new gent that was making comments on his gamestop store with the trade in offers they're seeing. Interesting perspectives there.
My pleasure. So tired. @_@
I agree the pricing was a problem. They made it a luxury item instead of a mass pricing item. It made the Halo bundle feel disconnected from the rush of the Halo appeal, if that makes sense. And some folks were less than enthused with the digital codes. Plenty of people do still want discs with their bundles.
We did have people doing that, but that's a lot harder to really weigh. Almost no one was doing that the night of the game release, since I mean, you could just grab the system at any time, and then preorder the game whenever for pickup. Really difficult to measure that sort of metric, you know? The Halo bundle made it a lot more obvious, so to speak.
Reference above. We were still selling the other bundles and getting more preorders, but those were just sort of sales throughout the month. It's not like sales simply were dead right up to the Halo release. Consoles were still being sold, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Hope that makes it clearer.
Mix of the two. We got quite a few into each of our stores, more than just enough to fulfill the preorders by far, but it feels like they may have misjudged or been too optimistic on the demand associated with the bundle itself, if that makes sense.
