Same. My friend group plays it pretty much every weekend. Been having a good time with it and all four of us like it more than Division 1.
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The Division 2 Sales Fail To Meet Ubisoft's Targets On PS4 And Xbox One
- Thread starter chadskin
- Start date
AAA GaaS looters are an unsustainable market, I don't understand how these companies don't get that, there is only so much time to go around, when you are producing games that are not your usual "story and done" type of game, how do they expect people to move on?, especially when you are courting people to spend (more) money on that experience, which builds engagement, which makes people less likely to move to something else.
There's the not-on-Steam factor to consider. I am certain that Ubisoft lost a good chunk of sales by not selling through Steam.
i dunno about that...dvision 1 on pc peaked at 113k, thats about a million copies sold, so its not too bad at all if you ask me.
which is the reason it will be absolutely massive in sales. they did good to make "just another Borderlands" instead of going full GaaS with BL3.
The original launch of Division 1 burned millions of players, so it's obviously unsurprising they'd be more hesitant to jump in at launch this time round.
People are willing it to be a flop so they can rag on GaaS lol
People are willing it to be a flop so they can rag on GaaS lol
True, true. Though I still don't think it really points to anything. As Div 1 didn't really set a low bar saleswise, so Ubi might just have had unreasonable expectations based on that and ignored it didn't exactly blow everyone away, especially at launch.
This is where i'm at. After playing Destiny 1 and 2, Division 1 and 2, Diablo 3, and Anthem, i've started to gravitate back towards games that actually have an ending. My backlog is huge from all the time i spent leveling in GaaS games, and it's been refreshing to pick a game, start it, and know that i can actually finish it and move on in a week or two.
Like, how much are we expected to play? There are so many good games, some of them like Ubis own AC Odyssey are just a huge timesink, there are a lot of ongoing "GaaS" games around, indies and stuff. I can totally see GaaS games having a hard time, they are a huge commitment and there is a limited number of players that are willing to dive into them.
it's basically the gamer equivalent of old people sitting at the slot machines all afternoon. i think the "market" is here to stay though you're going to see less breakout hits, more flops, but mostly games like Division 2 and Destiny 2 that do well enough.
That's a shame. It's a great game. It's still selling well though. The Division 3 isn't cancelled.
downgrade backlash hurts the game less than the woah factor, watch dogs and division 1 are still some of the biggest new ip launches of the generation.
Gotta wonder what the expectations were... Ubi has a lot of gaas games running.. at some point they will compete with themselves :P
From a financial standpoint the PC version must have been successful with a ton more sales on their own platform, still no growth in terms of users.
From a financial standpoint the PC version must have been successful with a ton more sales on their own platform, still no growth in terms of users.
they cannibalize their own games though, like this year, Division 2 and a little over a half year later Breakpoint. For sure many Div2 players will buy Breakpoint but when they are playing Breakpoint they aren´t available in Div2 which will lead to an player exodus, even if it is temporary.
people can only play one game at a time, that is the thing many companies seem to miss, they only care about the profit, it doesn´t matter what Ubi game you play-as long as you play an Ubi game. with those ever changing service games people have to spend too much time in one game but there are always other games begging for attention.
exactly
Well the first game was their most succesful launch ever, made like 350 million dollars in a few days or something like that. I guess they expected more than that. So even if it didnt reach their target if set this way, its still probably a gigantic launch and extremely profitable.
I mean just the other day someone made a thread where ubisoft had its best year with massive growth on PC and ranked 2.1 billion dollars for the year.
But Anthem is up there as some of the worst lies either told or implied from an unveil/trailer in this whole industry.
I watched people lose their fucking minds when Anthem was unveiled and cannonball off down rabbit holes of thinking Jesus was getting made into game-form. Now I will say some of that is part of pre-order/hype culture, which you as an individual need to get a fucking control of. I'll say it a million times to anyone over the age of 16, stop pre-ordering games. Just stop it.
But the money spent on crafting a flashy bullshit vertical slice is still an issue rampant in this industry, especially when the company/dev doesn't go on to let everyone know pre-release they haven't met their bullshit vision. But instead, they remain silent, review embargo for day 1/week 1 and allow the pre-orders to flood in based on lies.
After the shit release that Andromeda was gamers should have never pre-ordered Anthem, but I do still put a lot of blame on Bioware/EA for utterly lying and deceiving and doing little to reign it back in. Yes, they released a beta, which many could see the writing on the wall with, but betas are still low-key events in the grand scheme of things.
Bioware should not be apologising after release with PR, developers should be pre-announcing apologies to let everyone know they are about to release their game broken and missing half the shit they said or implied would be there. Until they start doing that with GAAS, zero sympathies from me. If you're not being transparent you aren't getting my time or pity.
There is a virus in this industry surrounding GAAS releases, and I am having no pity for unrealistic sales expectations in the wake of the culture nearly all developers have been contributing to for years now. Which is primarily just fucking release this, fix it or patch it up later because... GAAS. Throw around some roadmap.jpg and tell gamers not to be entitled they maybe expected the sequel in the series to retain most of what the first entry was eventually patched to contain.
Don't forget that The Division 1 is the game with the biggest opener ever at Ubi, if the expectations were beyond that and it failed to meet those expectations....then it's still a very very successful game even by AAA standards.
You could say the success of The Division 1 was an anomaly, it was a brand new IP that just sold unexpectedly but had little to no legs, unlike other games from Ubi. And I doubt even Ubi knows why it sold as much. I guess it was because people bought it for the cool visuals and perhaps didn't realise what kind of game it was and it wasn't really as fleshed out at launch. That's one of the reasons for the less than expected sales on consoles. How many looter shooters exist out there best Destiny, Warframe and Anthem (which is what a real flop looks like) in the first place for it to be a heavy competition enough to make the game a "flop"?
If the publisher keeps supporting the franchise then the player base can grow even with "less than expected" sales at launch.
Also no the lower sales is not because of the setting like some people are implying. While it may seem worse in one glance, the Div 2 is a lot more atmospheric and unique in look than The Div 1. It's also the only looter shooter that launched without any issues and was already content rich. In short the quality of the game is high.
You could say the success of The Division 1 was an anomaly, it was a brand new IP that just sold unexpectedly but had little to no legs, unlike other games from Ubi. And I doubt even Ubi knows why it sold as much. I guess it was because people bought it for the cool visuals and perhaps didn't realise what kind of game it was and it wasn't really as fleshed out at launch. That's one of the reasons for the less than expected sales on consoles. How many looter shooters exist out there best Destiny, Warframe and Anthem (which is what a real flop looks like) in the first place for it to be a heavy competition enough to make the game a "flop"?
If the publisher keeps supporting the franchise then the player base can grow even with "less than expected" sales at launch.
Also no the lower sales is not because of the setting like some people are implying. While it may seem worse in one glance, the Div 2 is a lot more atmospheric and unique in look than The Div 1. It's also the only looter shooter that launched without any issues and was already content rich. In short the quality of the game is high.
The snowy city was the most interesting character of the first game, the second one didnt have that same ffeling nor atmosphere
I don't know about that first part. I can't provide any proof but I certainly remember that I saw many, many people saying they passed on the game because of the setting. Now they might not have had any true intent on buying it to begin with but it certainly got a lot of discussion prior to launch and many were turned off by the change. I think to outright say it played no part isn't exactly accurate.
I do have to say this holds some merit. The second became a bit more indistinguishable from every other shooter.
Plus I really enjoyed the clothing/cosmetics in the snow world, now I really cba, especially considering they've gone full gambling/grind/MTs. My character basically looks the same as it did when I started playing. With the first, I felt far more desire to mess around with jackets/hats and so on.
While I'm not entirely sure if it would have been the right decision to stick with snow again, they've done little to distinguish the game from "post-apocalyptic background scenery from shutterstock".
I saw it too, but many many people at a forum like or similar to Era is still an inconsequential amount. These type of forums are known to not be representative of the general public.
To simply not purchase a game because of an entire setting being not exactly the same as the first one, is probably a bit much. And I would indeed say that those people were likely never truly interested in the first place and weren't going to buy. But even if we were to consider that as relevant, there could also be people who'd find the newer setting more appealing too.
There are so many games now that work on the basis of player retention. As in games that are trying to retain or ensure players periodically dip back in. This isn't even just what people describe as traditional "GAAS" models either. You have those big titles. Plus Overwatch, R6S, For Honor, Battlefield V, FIFAs, CODs, Anthem, Destiny, Sea of Thieves, etc etc...
Its a huge number of games that are trying to engage players for months and sometimes years. Even if each one suceeds only partially it takes player hours out of the overall pool. And mostly these are games that whilst you might dip in every week or two you can't leave for months on end...so players are sucked back in.
There are only so many of these games that can exist within the same time period and that time period is fairly long.....
Its a huge number of games that are trying to engage players for months and sometimes years. Even if each one suceeds only partially it takes player hours out of the overall pool. And mostly these are games that whilst you might dip in every week or two you can't leave for months on end...so players are sucked back in.
There are only so many of these games that can exist within the same time period and that time period is fairly long.....
Didn't Div2 have amazing pre-order numbers, even over Div1? If they based their forecast on that, I can see it falling short of expectations. And while the initial sales dip might be steeper than with the original, with Ubi's experience with GaaS, I can see Div2 be more successful in the long run.
Where I am it's the complete opposite. Every single kid in my god sons class are on console including those on his football team. About 70% of them are on ps4 and he's the 30% on xbox.
And they don't have a clue what to do when something goes wrong with it, as things invariably do with Windows and PCs. And they don't want to learn how to fix it either, it will be left to gather dust whilst they get on with gaming on their consoles again. Seen it happen.
And we have the next big FF14 expansion about to drop. Yikes.
But yes, every game now wanting constant retention in a market with more games than ever being released is simply like a bloodsport for going after player attention/time. Survival of the fittest? More like shareholders psychotic frenzies where unless you sell 45 million copies and retain 90% of that playing for 12+ months "expectations weren't met".
In a world where everyone is also more concerned with and glued to politics, employment and general life than ever before.
It shouldn't be a surprise millions of gamers exist that literally just play each yearly COD and FIFA. That's it, nothing else, other than collecting their monthly PS+ games which sit and do fuck all. People don't have time for hundreds if not thousands of games and those that think they do probably have backlogs that still have hundreds of unfinished PS3 games sitting on hard drives or as physical discs on a shelf.
Or a Steam library with 5,000 games of which 3.7% are completed.
The average movie will take 2 hours or so of your time. The average game wants you playing for upwards of 100 hours if not 5x that. It's just not sustainable when mixed with unrealistic shareholder expectations.
I used to buy quite a few premium games, on my xbox alone I have played 530 games, but since I started to play GaaS, games that are designed to be play for a long time (and in the case of PoE, forever) I haven't purchased a game in a long, long time.
There is nothing that the AAA space does, or is doing, that isn't done just as good, or better elsewhere, there is no reason for me to play anything else.
GaaS is my jam, but the AAA developers continue to miss the mark on how to make a decent one.
Weird. I would have put all my money on your bet :P I knew it wouldn't reach the TD1 sales.
Feels like an expansion that took stuff away that was in the original game. Got so boring I didn't even finish the campaign. A first for me.
I played TD2 story SP and it was a damn snoozefest. While the first wasn't amazing, it was definitely better than the second. I found myself just skipping next to everything in the second.
The gameplay and attention to detail are great, but maybe if you had played the first you'd see the story downgrade in the second.
I can even still remember the final mission of the first, I can't even remember the final mission of the second despite completing it only a matter of weeks ago.
I didn't pay much attention to the story other than the basic mission prep. I just found the gameplay itself super fun and liked seeing all of the famous DC locations (I visited the city back in 2009 and Massive really captured it well).
That part they do well for sure, but the ball is dropped in what the story could have been.
I remember zero characters from TD2 as well. All utterly forgettable. Not that TD1 was great there either, but hey, I still remember the Bullet King! lol.
Story is probably my one big complaint about Division 2. I don't think it's actively bad, just totally ho-hum and forgettable. Maybe I'm too nice to it considering my only other loot shooter experience is Destiny 2.
The Division 1 seemed to have a way more believable, more Clancy-esque scenario. I can buy a quarantined Manhattan erupting into anarchy after a biological terrorist attack. DC turning into some kind of post-apocalyptic Mad Max city filled with suicidal gangs though? It raises a lot more questions. All the talk about "settlements" and "rebuilding" seem funny to me considering all of society's stuff is still there.
You play the same activities over and over hoping for better loot, if that's not grindy then I don't know what is... On a side note I love grindy stuff so don't see that as a bad thing, the setting/story on the other hand sucks.