BtS a commercial failure?

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by Solver


Out of TBS games, Civ is the most popular, but in the grand scheme of things, even the most popular FPS games pale in comparison to other genres. These days, MMORPGs are absolutely HUGE - WoW being proof to that. FPS game are also huge - look at the sales of CoD4 or Bioshock. And then you have The Sims, selling by default, much as the appeal of those games escapes me. Strategy games cater to a smaller audience, and out of those, RTS is more popular than TBS.

It's sad but true. TBS is a subset of a subset of an genre which is not that popular.

While I would think that Civilization as a franchise has a lot of name recognition, the proportion of people who play it is a small fraction of people who have heard of it.

It's like chess--in the general population, how many people play chess regularly?

[Solver]

It's interesting to note, about chess, that it actually was extremely popular - as a mass sport - in the USSR. Almost everyone knew how to play chess and lots of Soviets actually played the game often.

[Dale]

Originally posted by Jvstin
While I would think that Civilization as a franchise has a lot of name recognition, the proportion of people who play it is a small fraction of people who have heard of it.

I disagree with that.

It was 5 years between Civ3 and Civ4. That's two generations when talking about computers.

Yes, in 2000 Civ probably had large name recognition. But these days with the huge influx of game players into the market in the last few years they do not know the name.

I would estimate (from my observation and experience) that less than 1% have name recognition with Civ.

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by Solver
It's interesting to note, about chess, that it actually was extremely popular - as a mass sport - in the USSR. Almost everyone knew how to play chess and lots of Soviets actually played the game often.

Oh. that's definitely true, given the propensity of Soviet Chess Champions. However, in the "West", its never been anywhere near as popular, not even in the days of Bobby Fischer.

I subscribe to, partly, the "Soccer" theory of Chess as far as its relative unpopularity--since Americans don't compete well on the world stage, it gets far less attention, respect and play than in the rest of the world.

[ybrevo]

Sorry, but what does chess have to do in this thread? Wasn´t it something about BTS being a potential commercial failure?

[wodan11]

Ultimately, the answer to that question depends on the basis of comparison. Are we asking if BtS lost money? Or, are we asking if Take2/Firaxis could have made more money if they had used their limited resources to make something else? The latter doesn't exactly make it a failure. And, it assumes those same resources were even usable for that "something else", both in type and amount.

Wodan