5958

Anyone else dying to know what Batman-related game is going to be free tomorrow on EGS? That little graphic has been killing me all week. I really hope it’s the Telltale Batman games. @divedivedive really enjoyed them, and from his writeup, they sound right up my alley.

5959

Hard to say; if you zoom in, you can see some Lego versions mixed with non-Lego, so perhaps a collection?

5960

So I’m guessing if the stated altruistic goal of forcing the distribution industry to change to a 88/12 split was actually true and held water an official Epic representative wouldn’t be posting gifs of Woody Harrelson rubbing money on his face.

That said I don’t quite follow the main thrust of this current line of argument that has Epic folks patting themselves on the back. Ian Boudreau’s argument would’ve held more punch if the two referenced games were not a F2P (with console stats mixed in) and one of the most anticipated games of the year. Borderlands 3 would’ve sold well if Stormfront was the exclusive site for purchase. So I guess, Hooray, for having a boatload of money and spending that on a sure safe bet.

5961

It’s actually an incredibly informative metric, since it’s easy to find reliable data points to compare to. Reliable PC sales numbers are hard to come by, so knowing e.g. that they sold 1M PC copies on launch day would tell us very little. There’s no good benchmark for what a AAA game should sell at launch. Reliable PC concurrent player counts are plentiful, thanks to Steam’s policies on publishing such data.

The relative BL2 to BL3 comparison is of course useless by itself due to changes in the market, but it gives us the absolute number of concurrents for BL3. With that we can, as has already been done in this thread, compare that number to other AAA PC games.

From that comparison, it’s clear that 250k is high enough that Gearbox must be happy with the sales, and the belief that people don’t buy games on the Epic store is unsupportable. (But it already was unsupportable before these numbers). It’s almost certainly selling faster than anything released on Steam this year. But the number is also not so high as to imply any kind of “look at how Epic is doubling sales” narrative. In the past, when AAA games were actually released on Steam, you would have had a few games each year with more successful launches.

5962

If you’re referring to me, that’s not what I am. I happen to work at Epic but I’m not posting here in any official capacity.

5963

It is definetly a commercial success, but Monster Hunter appears to have sold at a better clip if we look at concurrent players (330k), so saying it has outdone anything on Steam isn’t accurate right now.

5964

Yep, I have posted that exact Monster Hunter number as a comparison point earlier in the thread.

But please note that I didn’t write “anything on Steam”, because that would be obviously ridiculous :) Borderlands 3 isn’t PUBG or CS:GO, and is unlikely to ever be. The comparison I was making was to “anything released on Steam this year”. MHW was released last year, and is exactly the kind of thing I meant by previous years usually having a handful of games with bigger launches.

5965

Ahem… 779340
This moved 1 million copies on PC , in the first week. On Steam.

5966

Oh geez, you’re right. I cant believe that was last year. I was thinking it was early this year.

Where does the time go?!

5967

Sure. That had 190k concurrents at peak, so I’d still bet on Borderlands 3 having sold more: https://steamcharts.com/app/779340

But fair enough, that’s close enough to 250k that they can feasibly have equally fast sales. I looked at half a dozen AAA games from this year, and nothing was even close. I’m really surprised that Three Kingdoms was that popular compared to the Total Warhammers.

5968

I would point out that because BL3 came out on multiple platforms, so it’s likely that they cannibalize each other. Few people will buy the same game twice. Some will, but not the majority.

3 Kingdoms does not have that issue.

I would like to see a more apples to apples comparison.

5969

Chinese market is the difference. That also ties in to some of the discussion here earlier, about how the global market has grown since the release of Borderlands 2.

5970

No one was claiming that, just that Pitchford’s numbers in isolation don’t say anything. As @CraigM said, we’d need full numbers to understand what they mean: have console numbers similarly grown? Has PC grown but consoles shrunk or stayed even?

The market is a lot bigger now than it used to be. That doesn’t mean the game was sure to find success, though, so hearing it has more concurrent players is great news for Gearbox. It just doesn’t really tell us much about EGS, other than AAA exclusives can succeed there (which I don’t think has been in question).

5971

So, what is the most recent AAA title that came out on multiple platforms that we can compare it too?

5972

I don’t even know if you can just grab a AAA title and compare, because there’s a lot of variation between franchises as well. We’ve seen higher numbers with games like MHW like has been pointed out, and surely many lower as well.

I think all we can really take away from this is that AAA exclusives will move units on EGS, which is terrific news for Gearbox or other devs because of the better revenue split.

5973

Unfortunately, it’s probably Anthem Or Rage 2. You have to find a multi-platform, AAA budget, big marketing spend game, and those usually come out in the latter half of the year.

The next closest candidates would be Wolfenstein: Youngblood or Far Cry New Dawn, but both of those are more like AA games since they aren’t primary franchise releases.

5974

So, as of yet, no good comparisons? So, we just have to wait a bit longer.

5975

I’m genuinely asking this question, but what are we waiting for, exactly?

5976

AAA FPS/RPG hybrid that is on Steam, Xbox and PS4?

5977

That’s pretty specifc. You’ll be waiting forever.

I think you can just compare Borderlands 3 to any AAA shooter being released an all major platforms.