They’re pretty much dead now though right? Like stealth, shooting has been absorbed into bigger games - Battlefields, Fortnites, Far Crys.
Wolfenstein and the last Doom I guess. So not dead… perhaps elderly :)
I think that some games that came after Thief mistakenly thought players would enjoy stealth without having feedback about their visibility, or with instant death conditions once you’re discovered. People forget that even in Thief, while fighting guards after being discovered was often a mistake, you could usually run far enough away and hide in the shadows – your superpower made you near invisible, and the fact that the levels were systems-based and open meant you weren’t disrupting the storytelling (which happened mostly between levels anyway). So while full stealth is doable within these very specific parameters, designers didn’t understand that it can’t be done in a satisfying way if you have a more linear narrative structure. It’s therefore completely reasonable to expect that most good games employing stealth will devolve into action when the player is caught. Only a select few games should ever be expected to be fully stealthy, and the successful ones will have enough design elements to give you feedback as well as sufficient options once you’re caught. We’ve just been cursed with too many games that wanted to do stealth but didn’t understand what they needed to have along with it.
Coming back to the original topic of Hitman sales, someone has done an estimation looking at the leaderboards of the first mission:
I orchestrated collecting all the leaderboard numbers last Thursday, and at the time PC had 61K while Xbone and PS4 together had 60K. Our estimate then was 150K copies sold to account for everyone who hadn’t done Hawke’s Bay online on professional for whatever reason.
Using those same ratios, based on your 90K number we’d be up to 180K on professional leaderboards and 225K estimated sales.
Leaderboards are a clever approach. There’s one small weakness there which is that it’ll also count accounts that didn’t buy the game but have access to it due to the PS4/Xbox primary/secondary device policies, or Steam family sharing.
That’s a lot more PC heavy than the normal AAA game, but I guess Hitman is a franchise with particularly strong PC ties.