Bear in mind, people: only 40,000 copies were ever printed of the PS2 version of Rez. At this rate, Child of Eden has probably already sold more than its ten-year-old predecessor did.
However it's another sign that gamers don't really want something new. They want what is familiar and comfortable.
I think you forgot to point out that many people (myself included) look at SotD and see a slightly improved Resident Evil 4 with a Suda 51 paint job. If anything, it might be a bit too familiar. All they're doing is taking previously established concepts (3rd person shooter, Suda 51 potty jokes) and putting them together in a blender for, oh, five or six minutes.
Personally I think that selling Child of Eden for 50 dollars is a bit too much for a game that can be completed in 2 hours. I have played XBLA live arcade games which have cost far less than that and have had more content than Child of Eden.
The publisher probably got a little bit too greedy. With a lower price the game probably would have sold much better than it has.
People who don't lurk on the Internet would never have heard of, or seen Shadow of the Damned until it appeared on a shelf, that's one of the bigger problems.
Shadows of the Damned sounds like shovelware, and Child of Eden is fuckin Kinect. I saw a preview of Shadows of the Damned at EB Games and thought "Eh, looks ok, but is probably horrible". Something about the name just kills any optimism for that one haha
Can you blame people for not buying them? Both are short games with no replayability (seriously, a third person shooter with upgrades but NO new game plus? Jesus Christ, If I am going to pay 40-60 buck for your singeplayer game you better at least have a solid upgrade system to make me play it several times, and a very hard difficulty, like Dead Space 2)
I'd blame both of these occurrences on the fact that, had I not followed any video game news/commentary websites, I'd not know what the fuck either of these things were.
Some marketing would have helped Shadows of the Dammed.
Prior to watching the Quick Look here which made me think I might actually want to play it at some point, the only marketing I saw for this game was the "big johnson" trailer which made the game look incredibly awful.
@Zacagawea: Ugh that is horrible. Lets take Shadow of the damned as an example. According to Micheal Pachter about $36 out of the $60 goes to the publisher. So the publisher gets closer to $865,000 in revenue. Since it is parnter's deal I am not if developer gets paid before hand. Either way someone had to pay for labour (the majority of the cost of making a game). Being very generous, labour alone will approximately costs about $7.5M (avg 50 people per year x $50,000/person x 3 years).
I imagine Child of Eden would be a lot less with a smaller developer team and less time to make the game. I would estimate labour costs to be 2 million (20 people x $50,000 x 2 years).
Yes I know the average person probably makes closer to $100k a year
Back to the topic at hand. If they bundle Child of Eden with Kinect for a $100, I would probably go out and buy a Kinect right away.
Personally I think that selling Child of Eden for 50 dollars is a bit too much for a game that can be completed in 2 hours. I have played XBLA live arcade games which have cost far less than that and have had more content than Child of Eden.
I think that's a touch unfair. Some XBLA games may last longer, but the actual content (the music, the graphics, the design) in Child of Eden is fantastic. It in no way feels "budget" and it define a game purely by length is not looking at the bigger picture.
I lurk on gaming sites several hours a day, and I hadn't heard of SoTD unitl I saw the reviews. I've read / seen at least 20 items each for Alice and Eden.
They will make some money when they get a price reduction, on demand etc. They didn't release these in the Summer for no reason.
I'm losing my taste for drawn out third / first person shooters. It seems that's all we see these days. A strategy / RPG guy like me is searching for a good place to spend my money. More and more of my game time is being spent on cheap downloadable games.
Such a shame about Shadows and Alice. I bought both of them at Best Buy here in Canada for 39.99 each. A great deal and both games seem to be really awesome.
Child of Eden had a number of contributing factors; some unavoidable due to the type of game it is, and some sheer folly on the part of the publisher.
unavoidable: -it's a shooter that doesn't show well in preview video. "ooh shiney!" is about all anyone unfamiliar with Rez can glean from any trailer. -Rez HD sold alright as a $10-$15 (I don't remember which) downloadable title. Original PS2 Rez was extremely niche and I suspect most of the late popularity that had was due to the gamer girl vibrator article.
folly: -Whatever brand recognition Rez may have had was squandered anyway by a refusal to call this a sequel (which it is). -Pushed way too hard for Kinect audience, which is tiny. Totally failed to make it clear that this is a game you might want to, not to mention actually can, play on controller as well. Even after the game was released there were people frequently asking if it supported controller play at all, or if it would work without Kinect. -$50 price point with zero content to back it up. Did they think reviewers wouldn't mention that this game is about the same length as Rez was? -No digital release
With better marketing (controller support emphasized, Rez mentioned repeatedly), digital distribution, and a $20 price point, Child of Eden could have sold more than it did by order of magnitudes. It's a good game. Just not $50 boxed copy I'm not even sure if I can play this without that motion control gizmo good.
That Shadows of the Damned cover looked like some retarded ass bargain-basement shovelware game. I was always wondering why Amazon kept recommending that I buy the title through their store, and just scoffed at how stupid it looked. Child of Eden was never going to sell well. It's a sequel to fucking Rez, you guys. You're delusional if you thought that it had the makings of a bonafide hit. The fact that it sold 30,000+ copies on one system is pretty commendable IMO. SotD could have been a hit with the right, tongue in cheek marketing a la Bayonetta but that was botched horribly. Oh well.
@HerbieBug: Seeing as the Kinect has sold upwards of 10 million + units, I doubt that the Kinect audience is "tiny". The audience of people who wanted to own Child of Eden and owned a Kinect is tiny, however. Also, it's not like putting the name Rez on the cover would've done anything. People who love Rez already knew about and were excited for Child of Eden.
I know people will hate Child of Eden for it's length and the fact its virtually Rez, however it's one of my favourite games of the year, one of my favourite endings in a game ever and possibly the best Kinect experience I've ever had. To me the price tag is fine for the amount of content but I care more about the experience than hours to pounds/dollars/yen and it seems the majority of people disagree with me.
What surprises me is that Child of Eden is outselling Shadows of the Damned. I never expected either to sell particularly well, but I'd think Shadows would appeal to more people. I guess not.
So why is Shadows still in the $50-$60 range? A decent sale price would encourage me to buy it.
I know people will hate Child of Eden for it's length and the fact its virtually Rez, however it's one of my favourite games of the year, one of my favourite endings in a game ever and possibly the best Kinect experience I've ever had. To me the price tag is fine for the amount of content but I care more about the experience than hours to pounds/dollars/yen and it seems the majority of people disagree with me.
I think way too many gamers out there are hung up on the whole value per dollar thing. People have their expectations that $60 should be a set amount of content (10+ hr single player, multiplayer, etc). Personally, it's all relative. You pay for the amount of entertainment that you want/expect out of the game.
What surprises me is that Child of Eden is outselling Shadows of the Damned. I never expected either to sell particularly well, but I'd think Shadows would appeal to more people. I guess not.
It probably would if the marketing was better. Child of Eden had a big E3 stage demo and plenty of press, so most gamers know about it. Lots of people have no idea what Shadows of the Damned is, who developed it, or even that it exists at all.
I know people will hate Child of Eden for it's length and the fact its virtually Rez, however it's one of my favourite games of the year, one of my favourite endings in a game ever and possibly the best Kinect experience I've ever had. To me the price tag is fine for the amount of content but I care more about the experience than hours to pounds/dollars/yen and it seems the majority of people disagree with me.
I think way too many gamers out there are hung up on the whole value per dollar thing. People have their expectations that $60 should be a set amount of content (10+ hr single player, multiplayer, etc). Personally, it's all relative. You pay for the amount of entertainment that you want/expect out of the game.
Exactly. I could pay $60 for a game that lasts five hours and end up spending more time with it than a game that takes far longer to complete. I don't even know how much time I sank into Ikaruga back in the day. The game takes half an hour to beat and cost $50 on the GameCube. Of course, that's assuming you live long enough to see the end of the game.
I think the way the game came out so close to the initial marketing as well as the generic title and that it's a new IP, unknown by a lot of people who are looking to buy games with little money made Shadows of the Dammed so weak in sales.
Child of Eden supports a gamepad. It actually defaults to that unless you launch it using Kinect. But it works pretty well with Kinect, too, and the fact that it has separate leaderboards for each control method is pretty neat.
Child of Eden supports a gamepad. It actually defaults to that unless you launch it using Kinect. But it works pretty well with Kinect, too, and the fact that it has separate leaderboards for each control method is pretty neat.
Most people who harp on the Child of Eden Kinect support have never actually played it with kinect. The fact that @JerichoBlyth misspels the word kinect is probably proof of this
I know people will hate Child of Eden for it's length and the fact its virtually Rez, however it's one of my favourite games of the year, one of my favourite endings in a game ever and possibly the best Kinect experience I've ever had. To me the price tag is fine for the amount of content but I care more about the experience than hours to pounds/dollars/yen and it seems the majority of people disagree with me.
I'm with you on this entirely. It bums me out every time I see someone suggesting the length of a game should determine its price tag. When you start wondering whether you're getting your money's worth it's probably not the money that's the problem, it's that you're not really enjoying the game all that much [or you think you won't], which is fine of course. So far Child of Eden is my game of the year but I don't expect everyone to love the game or anything. It's just I'd rather people just say they aren't all that interested in what the game offers than suggest that every game can only be played once so you might as well play the longer ones.
I know people will hate Child of Eden for it's length and the fact its virtually Rez, however it's one of my favourite games of the year, one of my favourite endings in a game ever and possibly the best Kinect experience I've ever had. To me the price tag is fine for the amount of content but I care more about the experience than hours to pounds/dollars/yen and it seems the majority of people disagree with me.
I think way too many gamers out there are hung up on the whole value per dollar thing. People have their expectations that $60 should be a set amount of content (10+ hr single player, multiplayer, etc). Personally, it's all relative. You pay for the amount of entertainment that you want/expect out of the game.
Exactly. I could pay $60 for a game that lasts five hours and end up spending more time with it than a game that takes far longer to complete. I don't even know how much time I sank into Ikaruga back in the day. The game takes half an hour to beat and cost $50 on the GameCube. Of course, that's assuming you live long enough to see the end of the game.
Sure. I tink my longest playtime in Steam is still on Portal and Plants vs Zombies. I am often more likely to play twice through a four hour game than once through an eight hour game. Shorter games are often better paced and have less padding.
Of course, I've also had multiple playthroughs on Uncharted and Mass Effect, so maybe I just replay good games. Still, the point stands. Good is more relevant than long when it comes to getting entertainment value, even in number of hours played.
All this does is show the big game developers/publishes. That it's safe to cash in on re-makes, re-hashes etc. More Halo, Gears, CoD etc. New IP's and taking chances doesn't get you the big bucks. You can thank all the gamers out there for more of the same crap.
Marketing. All Marketing. Shadows of the Damned, from what I heard on the Bombcast along with the Quick Look I watched seemed fairly decent. Doesn't mean I would ever pay full price for it though I suppose. Which doesn't really help their cause.
Child of Eden supports a gamepad. It actually defaults to that unless you launch it using Kinect. But it works pretty well with Kinect, too, and the fact that it has separate leaderboards for each control method is pretty neat.
Most people who harp on the Child of Eden Kinect support have never actually played it with kinect. The fact that @JerichoBlyth misspels the word kinect is probably proof of this
I am afraid you're completely wrong. Never nice to assume. I work behind an Entertainment desk and basically demo videogames all that - so to be blunt - get it right fucking up you.
Child of Eden was nothing special. With or without Kinect. I believe the reason it didn't do well was because....
1. It was on display in Kinect only charts in MANY stores. In fact. I think I seen it in ONE general Xbox 360 chart and that was in Tesco of all places. 2. Rez was not all that popular to begin with. 3. Rez wasn't all that good to begin with. 4. The cover art looked like an EPIC series compilation CD full of dance/trance acts. 5. For a game like this to do well - it has to be advertised and featured on a lot of net-based shows and TV segements. A lot. This wasn't the case. It lacked appeal.
...oh and Kinnect 4 and you win. Shut the fuck up lol
I'm playing Shadows of the Damned right now. It is what I was expecting (and hoping), a tiny bit rough but rocking just the same. I'm honestly ashamed I bought DN Forever, it's still in it's amazon wrapper. Pathetically that is the best I can do to communicate what I think about how I spent my own money, and the more I think about it, the more I contemplate returning DNF...but becausae of the discount and other such, I won't.
I bought both and honestly, neither game is very mindbendingly amazing. They are both decent games to pass the time over the the slower summer months of gaming, but there is nothing about either game that would make them a AAA blockbuster. Shadows of the Damned has a kind of cool story/setting, but the gameplay mechanics are still a little wonky and stuck in that last gen TPS control scheme. Child of Eden is a beautiful experience, but it does not have much in the way of content, and the fact that you have to replay some eariler levels multiple times to get to the later levels is a little off-putting. They are both games that will probably sell decently over the course of this generation, but I can totally understand why people would be hesitant about going out and spending $50-60 on these games.
Garcia Fucking Hotspurr. Child of eden will do fine idf they lower the price to 20$ or something... Shadows of the damned idk... but most people are waiting for that game to go down in price to buy it. Plus the fact that u can't replay levels in shadows of the damned makes people think twice before considering it. They better do a prce drop orf a patch fast before it gets lost in the shuffle and people forget about it and move on to better games. The army of games is coming this fall btw... kinda suspicious that everyone is rushing to realese games on time withouth delays... new consoles?
@HerbieBug: Seeing as the Kinect has sold upwards of 10 million + units, I doubt that the Kinect audience is "tiny". The audience of people who wanted to own Child of Eden and owned a Kinect is tiny, however. Also, it's not like putting the name Rez on the cover would've done anything. People who love Rez already knew about and were excited for Child of Eden.
The kinect audience is tiny in comparison to the total audience of the 360; the audience they refused to market to by focusing their advertising solely on Kinect functionality. You had to scour through previews just to figure out if controller was supported for this game. Big mistake.
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