Max Payne 3 bombed when it shipped over 4 million copies?

It seems like I've heard them say Max Payne 3 bombed, flopped, did poorly, etc several times. It's mainly coming from Patrick and he said this last episode they only sold like half a million copies, but in this week's earning report 2K says they shipped over 4 million copies (link below), so are the guys just wrong, overly exaggerating, the numbers are fudged, or what?

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/13/max-payne-3-ships-4-million-borderlands-2-on-track-to-be-2ks-b/

shipped, not sold

It sold 1.26 million according to VGChartz, with less than half a million in the first month (what Patrick was referring to).

Shipping and selling are two different things.

Not that I know if their statements were true or not, but there's a big difference between shipped and sold. Shipped only means how many copies they released into the market, sold is how many actually reached customers.

@alekss: 2K sold over 4 million to stores... the exact numbers that stores sells to gamers are hardly ever released. Also, why would stores keep ordering so many copies if they didn't need them? Max Payne coasters?

Also, you need to take into account the projected sales and the amount spent on producing the game. That's why SE is unhappy with the Tomb Raider and Hitman, even though both sold pretty well

It's all because of the insanely bloated marketing budgets these games have. Does TV-spots even sell games anymore?

This is all Wikipedia had to say on the topic of sales.

assassins creed . in the uk i always see assassins creed adverts even for the vita -_0

@ahaisthisourchance: What's a TV? I have not watched TV in almost a decade and I don't miss it. There's enough ways to get the one or two tv shows I find interesting online that I have no need for the thing. Everyone I talk to that's my age or younger are pretty much all in the same boat. It's only our parents and older that still watch TV with the odd exception here and there.

@shagge said:

VGChartz are the least reliable source of any sort of information anywhere on the internet.

Yup, these numbers aren't usually released publicly so often they are completely made up. Now and then you'll get big first week sales numbers or your big call of duty numbers here and there but for the most part all that stuff is not released.

I think they used max payne3 a test for their tech, since the shooting mechanic will be in GTAV, I think the engine as well.

I didn't like citing them, but that number is in line with everything else I've seen, so it'll do in this case. I know it's not scientific, but it's likely ballpark at least. And the half-mil number comes from NPD. My point is mainly that the 4 million shipped has nothing to do with the number sold. And adding to that point: First month sales are all that matter in determining a flop. They could sell 8 million copies tomorrow and it would still be one.

Diablo 3 definitely took sales away. Max Payne is a great game though.

Patrick just corrected himself on twitter a bit https://twitter.com/patrickklepek/status/334721295986073600

Shame it didn't sell what they wanted. One of the best games of last year

E.T. is frequently cited as a contributing factor to Atari's massive financial losses during 1983 and 1984. It is speculated that as a result of overproduction and returns, millions of unsold cartridges were buried in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill. The game's commercial failure and resulting effects on Atari are frequently cited as a contributing factor to the video game industry crash of1983.

An example of shipping millions and selling few.

Max Payne 3 crashed in price quickly and even Xbox on demand will sell MP3 in a sale for £3.50/$5!!! Steam often put in in sales as £3.50/$5.

No other games I have seen resort to such harsh measure so quickly, Indie games get treated better than this.

It's worth taking into consideration that the project was supposedly scrapped and rebuilt from the ground-up several times, which no doubt caused the budget to inflate several times over. Only way 2K would've broke even is if they hit COD numbers, which was never going to happen.

Excellent game though. James McCaffrey needs to do more voice work. I personally think he would have played a better Booker DeWitt.

I have to wonder, along the lines of what @gunnerjensen is referring, about whether so-called AAA devs and publishers still have a hard time being efficient with their time and money. Nothing drives up costs like mismanagement which I imagine is much easier with big teams, outsourcing, frequent corporate management changes, and/or taking bigger risks on re-do's and the lot.

I know what trend I want during GOTY time for "thing that needs to stop": More than moderately successful titles not being a "success" because of the unreasonably high expectations/financial demand put on them. If this is another way to say game dev and publishing costs are way too high, then I'm for that too. Here's hoping something tapers or costs go down because hot damn gaming is going to feel the crunch more, not less, if these costs aren't addressed somehow.

I love Max Payne 3, the game is one of the few that I have replayed just for the pleasure of the gameplay, and I would give anything to reinvigorate the multiplayer on the PC. Sad that a game of this quality is forgotten about so quickly :(

@bacongames: Yep I think some companies have some serious issues, Square enix being the latest reminder of that.

I doubt we'll see another Max Payne for a long while which is a terrible shame but not entirely surprising considering it has never been a AAA franchise.

Shipped and sold are different.

Also for being on 3 platforms, and having been in the works for a while, disappointing. And not just that, a lot of those copies were probably on the cheap. My brother got it for 25 bucks on black friday and it has been cheap ever since. It sold ok, but was disappointing.

They don't keep ordering. They estimate how many they'll need initially (probably in cooperation with publishers?) and sometimes shoot way, way over. Presumably there is some kind of mechanism in place which allows stores to return stock when this happens.

How much do the developers sell games to the stores for?

Max Payne 3 is 10/10

Max Payne 3 is the most awesome 3rd person shooter experience this generation, outside of maybe Warhammer 40k Space Marine (for nailing the feeling of being an Ultramarine), at least in my book. Everybody who didn't play it yet, should drop 10$ or whatever it costs today on it and play Max Payne 3 right now. If the game doesn't sell 10 million copies by the end of this month, I'm no longer your friend. You hear me internet?

I agree with you but (and I hate to be that guy) I don't see people being able to enjoy it properly without a mouse and keyboard. It is one of the few shooters I have played since owning a game capable PC that really felt like it needed the mouse and keyboard to be enjoyed properly.

It sold below expectations. "expectations" in this case usually means "we felt comfortable spending this much money up-front on development and marketing and production etc because we EXPECT it to be able to make it back once the game is released". How publishers come to these numbers is something of a quagmire and it leads to some games selling millions of copies and still being labelled a disappointment.

Considering how expensive game development is and how MP3 took FOREVER to come out and then was marketed to high hell I can imagine the bill for that game was astronomical. The publisher clearly felt that the game warranted the amount of money they spent or at least needed to believe it did because there was too much time and money riding on it already to back out now.

Exactly.

I still need to play it, but it has a hell of a soundtrack.

Now I'm just worried the game I think it is based off of the soundtrack won't be as good as the actual game.

But I've never played the other two, so I haven't really felt the urge to get to it yet.

@pie: I would like to agree with you on principle and because the previous games were launched first on pc but I found the console version of Max payne 3 to be highly enjoyable.

This is a case where it's too bad, maybe (though I wasn't MP3's biggest fan) but we don't have to regret that there won't be a sequel. I'd say Max Payne has ridden off into the sunset either way.

Though I think that the main reason for the losses suffered by Square Enix are their own games. It just annoys me to no end that they are using the games developed by Eidos as their scapegoat.

On the other hand I can understand that 2K think that Max Payne sold poorly since GTA´s are such megasellers. But I think that they should have maybe stuck a bit more to the original idea of Max Payne. Max Payne as a character feels different from the earlier Max Payne games where there was a bit of self irony going on even when things looked bleak.

The newest Max Payne just seems a bit too serious. I also dont like the change of environment in the new Max Payne game. It is just way too sunny.

@crosstheatlantic: The game definitely feels like the soundtrack.

Well, there you go.

I've played it first with mouse and keyboard, then tried the gamepad - and never looked back. Different strokes for different blokes I guess. Played through it 3 times on different difficulty settings. The gamepad controls are up to the task. I'm a *four finger stance* kinda player, so I have 6 organic hotkeys at my disposal in dualstick controlscheme games - which can feel a cut above and beyond KB & M for me.

Turning up acceleration to the max did wonders for control responsiveness. I don't understand why acceleration settings aren't a standard option nowadays. It's the kind of thing developers should let the players decide, lest one is stuck with totally screwed up settings like in Killzone 2 (pre-patch). So far, Max Payne 3 is the only game I can recall giving me that option. Hopefully more designers see the light, and make it an industry standard.

@jimbo: They didn't used to have a method for returning games to publishers. I remember an episode of the Hotspot where they talked about how that was a major difference between movies and games and one of the reasons pre-orders were pushed so hard. Mind you that was six or seven years ago, so it might be different now.

@giyn I assume the price varies by the size of the order. I used to work for a Canadian video chain and they paid about $55 for a $60 game, but I imagine they weren't ordering in nearly the quantities Gamestop or Best Buy do. Still, I doubt they get them significantly cheaper, it's not like they are paying $20 a copy or anything.

So did RE6 and Tomb Raider at 3.5+ million in sales. Companies need to do a better job of financing these projects. If you have to sell CoD numbers to even make a profit, that is crazy.

I wasn't either. I loved the first two games, but Max Payne 3 just wasn't as fun, despite a great story and presentation. It felt like the enemies took way too many bullets before they died, and I remember dying a lot. Maybe I was just frustrated because I was rushed when playing it.

It wasn't the financing that's wrong with Tomb Raider, it was Square Enix's ridiculous expectations of it keeping them in profit because their main Japanese division couldn't make any money.

@pie: Well, if that's the case then I'm gonna have to make time for it.