So, about "top sellers"

General Discussion
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So, in on of the review threads some people started to argue how OW 2 is a success despite reviews because of its top sales (was #12 at the moment of that argument).

But is it really the case?

– The marketing campaign involving celebrities and on-site billboards in major cities was very costly
– Even at the peak, the game was losing to single-player games that have only one purchase: the game itself and therefore cannot bring money from same customers say, the day after those customers bought that game
– Even at the peak, it was comparable to titles directly above it - titles like GTA 5 that was on sale. Are we measuring success by having the peak of interest comparable to a second price games now?

But the reason for this thread is not all that. I knew that it is a failure if we look at the numbers without the pink glasses. However, today I’ve checked the sales charts - and what do you know?

– BG3, the game everyone predicted to slide down the chart after a couple of days, still stands strong
– OW 2 is now down to 35th position. And it was already at number 21 yesterday. So the decline is real and it’s sharp. It’s not even a week after release.
– OW 2 is now significantly below titles like … Fallout 76 (talk quality). It’s comparable to Doom Eternal, a single-player game on sale for 25% price

So - I don’t know. If you’re coping really hard then maybe it’s not a failure to be comparable to single player games going on sale, but the fact it lost so many positions of the chart before even a week in is not possible to cope out no matter the dose.

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If you look at the accounts, they are typically vague.

But you can see that OW2 has done alright since launch. Not set the world alight, but it did ok. Which is to be expected for a game that was meant to launch now, but got pushed out half baked 10 months earlier than planned because the previous entry was killing the IP off.

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And how exactly do you know it? What is your source that it’s “alright”? I base my understanding on facts by comparing it to titles in the chart (directly below and above) and deducing what could be a ballpark for that “success”.

Saying “it’s done alright” out of thin air isn’t doing anything. Aside from that, if the backsliding continues, it will be on its way out of top-100 chart before two weeks are over. Is that “doing alright” too?

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They published the financial summary to June 2023.

For the first time in many years, the year to June 2023, PC made more for them than console. Which surprised me.

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The figures till June 2023 has no bearing now in Aug 2023.

You can’t make any argument with that.

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Top sales? I thought the game was free

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Man you’re dedicating so much time to this, I suggest you do something else for a while and forget about ow2 if you’re this obssessed with it and hate it at the same time.

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You can only use the figures they’ve published.

From June to now, we’ll have to wait and see if they’ll publish quarterly numbers. But with the current season, I think they’ll see a spike, and then hope to retain going forward

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Yes, it is and no amount of angry Steam reviews will change it. Sorry. Its at the same level as freaking Starfield… in terms of steam stats. So good luck.

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If you are talking about how it’s doing on steam, I think you are looking too much into it.

It’s a free to play game. I think the only reason it’s in the “top selling” category on the site is because everyone who is upset with Blizzard and Overwatch’s flaws all downloaded the game for the purpose of reviews. If they didn’t want to review the game so bad then it probably wouldn’t be #12. It would possibly be lower.

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OW2’s monetization is already a very old one. They’ve tried to clone Paladins’ monetization but its inferior compared to that.

OWL is pulling them down. They sink more money to it than they get back

They’ve hired celebrities and made so many marketing for both OW2 and D4 for both to fail miserably.

Baldur’s Gate is casually stomping on the video game industry so hard that all AAA companies are raging at them out of envy.

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Diablo 4 was the fastest selling Blizz game of all time… and helped the company reach $1 billion in a single quarter for the first time ever…but sure ! Financial failure!

No one is doing that, you should stop watching those clickbait Youtube videos and maybe go read the actual Dev tweets for what they are, lol

Devs are simply saying they aren’t looking forward to the rampant wave of gamers comparing every game release from now on the Baldurs Gate 3 because BG3 has had an unrealistic amount of developers and development time and a hugely established IP behind it. The same way that people who watch movies are comparing everything with under water VFX to Avatar 2 now despite that being an unrealistic standard for most films

I don’t get why that’s so hard for people to understand. No one is jealous of BG3. Everyone is enjoying the game. They just are discussing the reality of how gamers don’t understand game development.

I say this while I have BG3 open right now on my 3rd playthrough after buying the digital deluxe early access to support the Devs and having already sunk 126 hours into the game

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Of course it gonna leave the top sellers very quickly.

It just counts how many players click “add to my account”.

What matters for Free 2 play games is the number of ppl buying in-game stuff, which isn’t acknowleged by Steam.

And OW2 is top 19 most played on steam when I write this answer.

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And then half of the playerbase boycotted because how bad Season 1 was and many of them even refunded if they’ve still met the conditions.

I think you’re the one who needs to stop watching Youtube videos. Its on the top of the statistics both financially and review-wise and is an industry changing game like WoW was in its hay day.

Hell i might even purchase it for the sole purpose of giving the devs the money they deserve.

No one wants every movie to be like Avatar 2 because they want that style to stay with James Cameron. And its true to gaming as well. No one will suddenly expect every gameplay to be like BG3 because thats the signature of their devs. They just want the other companies to take note from the positive aspects of the game.

Yep. I remember when OW2 had 1 million active views on Twitch. Now the “Twitch doesn’t count” crew doesn’t want to talk about the decline and how it went below average of the genre they’ve founded basically.

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You can’t refund after playing for only 2 hours and if you somehow hadn’t played 2 hours of the game you can’t refund 14 days after purchasing so I really doubt that a large amount of people were even ABLE to refund in Season 1, considering it was 2 months after the game launched, lol

They made insane money from Diablo 4, period. Yes, Season 1 blows, I haven’t touched it since it started, but hopefully they take the feedback seriously. Regardless, the game has been a huge financial success for them

That’s…great? I already said I love the game and have 130 hours in it? lol? What does that have to do with anything I said?

lol so you don’t even have the game but you’re trying to educate me on it despite me having 130 hours on it :sob:

You don’t read social media then, clearly

After Avatar came out, everyone started criticizing the Little Mermaid’s underwater CGI. I saw endless Twitter and Youtube comments about it “Why does the underwater look so bad compared to Avatar?”. It’s like people magically forgot that Avatar 2 took 13 years to make.

Game devs have simply been expressing on Twitter that they aren’t looking forward to getting that same treatment with anything they release getting compared to BG3. It’s not that deep, no one is jealous

Gamers are just lacking in understanding of the game development process, of how long things take, of how much resources things take, of how higher ups effect decisions and content releases, and they go on social media and complain and call Devs lazy 24/7 and Devs are tired of it. The end.

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The problem, at least the one you are missing, is that Steam is a crumb of the playerbase. Between BNet and console do you really think Steam reaches even 10% or is it more likely 5%, if that?

So somehow this small fraction of your playerbase, presumably new, spent enough to get OW up to 7-12 on Steam for a few days. Now they couldn’t sustain it for the obvious reasons that you are again dealing with a very small number of players and that new players don’t start as whales so buying the PvE and BP is just them just dipping their toe in. Usually whales happen a few months in when that one skin for that one hero comes out so they buy just the one skin and then it begins.

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There could be only two options - if one has basic logic.

– 1: This statement is false. In this case the steam player numbers are in fact a significant portion of the overall player-base. That means the sales are bad in general, not only on Steam (though this thread never targeted overall OW 2 performance, only the Steam one). So - well, it’s … bad then.

– 2: This statement is true. In this case it still doesn’t refute the fact Steam release flopped commercially, but it then means something bad in another department - if Steam players uptick was so negligible, then - first, all that marketing budget was wasted, and - second, they got tons of bad publicity for nothing. Way to go.

Are you serious? What are you living in, fantasy? If that was the case then no game dev would ever put a price tag on their game and always implement in-game store to bypass Steam’s 30% fee for transactions. Valve isn’t stupid, of course they have it in their conditions of serving games in their platform. Steam users pay 70% to ActiBlizz and 30% to Valve from each of their skin.

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Your premise is faulty because you assume that the only way for success of the Steam release to be a success is if it was a significant portion of the playerbase, or that it means the marketing was a “waste”. This last part is the key point of failure in your premise as it does not matter to Blizzard whether you play on Console or Steam or through BNet App (though if they could choose they would choose BNet App).

The marketing was to get people to play season 6 and if they do that the marketing was a success. Whatever platform is secondary to getting them first to log in and secondly to buy chapter 1 of the campaign. Based on the early numbers from Steam, even on Steam you had people logging in and playing chapter 1 of the campaign. So that box can be ticked a success.

Right now, supposedly, there are over 42,000 people playing OW on Steam. Now while some are likely using Steam Deck who were already playing Overwatch (at least I assume that works for Overwatch), a large chunk likely are not playing on the BNet app which means thousands of new customers for basically no investment on your part. That is net win.

Basically you created a false dichotomy and hopefully I have explained adequately the key problem with it.

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And? Every big title spends lots of money marketing.

This makes sense, being that OW2 is a f2p game, not a one time purchase. That’s actually one of the reasons that it’s amazing that it was so high on the list. OW2 isn’t even charging full price for a game. Most people are probably, at most, spending about $15. Why do you not understand, that WEAKENS your argument. It shouldn’t even be CLOSE to games that are one time purchases.

Yeah, with that revenue number being a VERY SMALL % of people that play OW2. In reality, it was probably a top 5 selling game, just from season 6.

No one predicted it would fall after a couple of days, lol. Get back to me in a month.

This is more like where I would’ve expected OW2 to be, on day 1. I can’t believe it reached top 10 at one point. That is CRAZY, for ONLY being steam sales.

It’s weird that you can’t seem to understand that it’s not representative of OW2’s total sales, but only a small percentage of players - those that use steam.

It was a top seller in terms of revenue. Meaning, people had to make in game purchases for it to be on that list. That’s what’s so amazing.

This is incorrect. The list I’m referring to is literally labeled as -

“Top 100 selling games right now, by revenue”

And description -

“Top Sellers lists are generated automatically based on all revenue sources for a game, including DLC and in-game transactions.”

It doesn’t count downloads, unless it costs money to download that game.

This is another good point.

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People gotta stop weaponizing BG3’s success against other games. It’s a weird talking point.

Also, who cares? Why do you care about Steam sale numbers? I dont care, why do you?

Also why would you expect OW2 to be big on steam? most people interested in the game already had it on Bnet? so not accounting for that fact is extremely bad faith.

You’re basically doing the whole “lying with statistics” thing. Gross.

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