Forums > Game Forums > Dead Meets Lead > Dang pirates.

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Indra was here (20760) on 6/25/2013 5:08 PM · Permalink · Report

I almost feel bad for the blokes who developed this game. Not a single copy sold and yet 80,000 people playing it. Dang pirates should be strung up. Whaddya looking at me for? It's legal to do this in my territorial waters. :p

Full disclosure.

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Cavalary (11445) on 6/25/2013 7:58 PM · Permalink · Report

80000 people total, and they say very low sales, below their most pessimistic expectations, not zero, right? And 80000 "pirates" worldwide doesn't mean much for a game. 80k regular players over a period of time of it would probably mean some 20k sales under normal scenarios (3-4k under those EA or Ubisoft would make us believe), but 80k total can just be a bunch of people who picked it up, tried it out a bit, said nah and moved on.

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Daniel Saner (3503) on 6/28/2013 6:48 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Well, I'm glad to see that they're smart enough to not claim that piracy was the cause for their bad sales numbers. Most of the 80,000 active pirated copies can probably be attributed to the teens who download all releases, playing each one for 10 minutes and then moving on. Before sales must come public interest, and that doesn't seem to have worked out here.

I'm personally not even part of the question because I don't give a second glance to zombie games—usually my first assumption in trying to explain things would be that others must have felt the same way as I did, but of course I know that these days you can flog pretty much anything if you put zombies or vampires in it. It seems to have been more of a publicity problem than audience oversaturation.

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Cavalary (11445) on 6/28/2013 7:28 PM · Permalink · Report

[Q --start Daniel Saner wrote--]but of course I know that these days you can flog pretty much anything if you put zombies or vampires in it. It seems to have been more of a publicity problem than audience oversaturation. [/Q --end Daniel Saner wrote--]

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But there has been quite a dearth of "serious" vampires in a long time, and even the washed-out "modern" version is usually just found in the books everyone and their dog seems to be writing in recent years and in the movies and TV series based on some of them, while in gaming even those... things are oddly absent...

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Indra was here (20760) on 6/28/2013 7:48 PM · Permalink · Report

Why they're not creating zombie protagonist games is beyond me. I would've thought it would catch on a bit after Warm Bodies.

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Indra was here (20760) on 6/28/2013 8:41 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

That would make it Protagonist: Zombie instead of Theme: Zombie, well if he were alone. Apparently he can make friends.

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Daniel Saner (3503) on 7/6/2013 11:16 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Incidentally, Kalypso released one just a few days ago: DARK. It also seems to take some inspiration from Deus Ex.

I'm not sure about the abilities thing, but I would probably give it a try if I could get it in a sale.

I noticed a change in my perspective when watching trailers like this: a decade ago I would have been suspicious if a budget/mid-range publisher tried to do a more ambitious game. It would not be as polished as a AAA title and a lot could go wrong. These days, I get more interested in a game if it has a smaller publisher name attached. The chance of the game turning out to be surprisingly good is bigger than that of an AAA title actually not being bland.

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Indra was here (20760) on 7/6/2013 11:47 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

Ugh, a 4 GB download. I'm a bit paranoid of any game that looks like Deus Ex: Human Revolution due to fear of boredom. Then again, these linear story-based games are bound to be dull anyway, since there's nothing to do in between except follow the plot. Yeah, bite me, Mass Effect.

Well, back to playing Warband.

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Cavalary (11445) on 7/7/2013 12:26 AM · Permalink · Report

Yeah, saw that... but forgot where the thread where I said it was, was looking through the other categories, so didn't post.

And yeah, well put about the smaller publishers. Independent releases too, and in fact likely even more so.