A couple of hours ago, we informed you about the closure of Visceral Studios. And now, former Battlefield Hardline and Star Wars level designer, Zach Wilson, revealed some really interesting information about Dead Space 2. According to him, Dead Space 2 sold around 4 million copies, and that still wasn’t enough for Electronic Arts.
Now while Zach Wilson did not clarify whether the game was profitable or not, he did reveal that it did not meet EA’s expectations. Zach Wilson also stated that the game under-performed. However, we believe that Dead Space 2 sold well. After all, we are talking about a horror game selling around 4 million copies is a big deal. And like it or not, this was, is, and will always be a niche genre.
https://twitter.com/covernode/status/920393692246134785
This reminds me of Square Enix’s ridiculous expectations for Tomb Raider. Thankfully, Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs broke even. However, and similarly to Square Enix, it appears that EA was not satisfied with Dead Space 2’s sales.
https://twitter.com/covernode/status/920421025405440000
The fact that Dead Space 2 did not meet EA’s expectations may explain the inclusion of all those ridiculous micro-transactions in Dead Space 3. And since Dead Space 3 was not a commercial success, EA decided to simply kill the franchise. That’s the most logical explanation as to why we never saw a new Dead Space game.
For comparison purposes, Zach revealed that the first Dead Space game cost around 37 million.
https://twitter.com/covernode/status/920446287530541056
These are some really interesting details about the production/expectations of triple-A games. Unfortunately, they also prove that most publishers are as greedy as they can get when it comes to the franchises they own. The sad thing is that a bit more reasonable sales expectations would guarantee the existence of new gaming experiences. But it appears that most publishers are simply looking for the the next COD or Destiny game (sales wise) instead of creating a nice portfolio of important titles.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Surely we need even more money pumped into viral marketing
What a surprise. No wonder they gutted Dead Space so badly with the third entry.
After all, we all know how well pandering to the masses with mainstreaming & accessibility at the cost of your core fanbase ultimately works out, right? Right? >.>
Zatara get laid more often, it’ll help your narrow minded and frankly sad world view. Sad, sad child.
That’s funny, that sounds exactly like what I should be saying to you right now….. :O
Your responses are so lame and perdictable bro. Sad!
You mean like you? Hm.
I think you meant yourself… hmmm. That’s how lame your responses are. Think about ending it all bro.
No thanks, but you’re welcome to.
Triggered
Nope.
Triggered again
Lol’d.
Triggered
Just block him, he has nothing of value to say to anyone.
I wonder it’s a bot. Surely no one spends so much time on this site posting garbage comments. That would be a pitiful person if it’s not a bot.
Trump2020 or Sp4ctr0?
Trust me, he gets laid too much 😉
Now I know the name of Zatara’s alt account.
Omg, man before reading this i read your post on daggerfall unity “wase of time doing a project like this”
Such a negative Nancy, geez.
Just a troll, ignore him, he’s the new Hvd.
You sad, sad child. TRIGGERED, TRIGGER TIGGER TRIGGERED!
Triggered.
Don’t forget the single player microtransactions they shoved in.
Right!
Honestly man i think the series went to meh with the second game. The first was originally designed as system shock 3. They added all those cool non hud elements and it had alot of logs and puzzles around repairing stuff, because you are an engineer. The second game became a linear action shooter, not scary, no backtracking, levels were linear and then we got dead space 3 that the only thing about it that is remotely good is the space sections.
Yeah, the second wasn’t that good, but they could have salvaged it with the third entry through backtracking had EA not stepped in & defiled the series even further.
Yes because backtracking automatically makes games better, you idiot.
Troll.
Troll
Could be. They did pick this strategy up from Hollywood, after all…..
The story was getting bad. No doubt. I mean the first game was a blast, i still remember being scared in the beginning
“CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS”
Good days. Played the entire serie and i liked it but yea 3 was enough anyways.
4 millions is a failure for EA?
funny games in 2008 considered 4 million copies sold to a best selling franchise
though 60 million and for production this pile of garbage game? were EA snorting the money on advertisement or something? a game like Dead Space 3 could be made with a fraction of the money
considering how f**king bad it is…
Dead Space 2 was 60 million.
what about advertising? were the 60 million part of them?
or EA added more to advertising? (considering Destiny had like 500 Mill which felt like 80% of the money went to advertising)
according to the guy in some of his later posts games cost about as much to market as they do to make (he said this anecdotally) so you can assume ~$60M for marketing as well.
Or that $30 million of that $60 million was spent on marketing, because EA figured they can just throw money at the marketing department & they’ll net them a return.
They’re definitely stupid enough, after all.
$60 was spent on development, and another $60 on marketing.
In this case, I believe the marketing was included in the 60 mil
$60 was spent on development, and another $60 on marketing…
Only $60? Wow. Cheap
Yes, tell us all how cheap AAA gaming development would be if you were in charge!
Well we do not know the timeframe for that sale. It could be lifetime. They could sell half of them (or even more) for a lower price, like 10 dollars. We know 2 things, the game development cost is 60 million, and it reached 4 million sales.
And one more thing: the game quality dont do anything with the development cost. You can develop a bad game for 10 years with a 200 million budget in the AAA scene. You could put your heart and soul in he game and end up with a generally bad experience. It is not easy to develop a good game, it’s hard and it’s demanding.
If only there was a way to make sure games dont cost so much to make, something something related to cinematic feel and acting and tacked on multiplayer and high marketing….oh i know, we just gonna add microtransactions in it and day one dlc to cover up the costs.
No suprise. Obviously AAA BS games were made for the masses(console)
BTW,Well is that the Gaming Industry has become a joke .
You’re the only joke here. Not a very good one either, some things never change.
So updated one PC to the Fall Creator update. Game mode can no longer be turned off? It just says “This PC supports game mode”. “Trueplay” under gaming is off by default but it says it will “share system info with games.”
Loved the Dead Space series. Got 1 and 2 from Steam, the 3rd came via Torrent. Not spending a penny on Origin.
I reported you for torrenting, enjoy.
The torrenting police…
Psst, they exist in his head.
He’ll find out, you just have to wait.
When you both have pennies to begin with I can see why you wouldn’t want to spend more.
The Don is running straight Intel/Nvidia. Obummer was AMD/ATI.
Being an idiot you went way off topic in suggesting I was poor.
With 1,652 titles in my Steam library, why would I want or need another store front? Even Ubisoft recognised this.
Truggered
“what a dumbass you are.”
“Origin is much better than Steam”
How can you put those things together and the universe not exploding out of sheer frustration is beyond me.
In what way?
??????????????????
EA is the Harvey Weinstein of video games: you only make the deal if you’re okay with getting f*cked.
Sad but true. If you dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change. He changes you.
https://image.prntscr.com/image/WjhE4h4bSkC1cs7D5BjQCQ.png
You know i find this whole thing to be utterly funnny he and all his sjw buddies in hollywood and the media are 100% despicable people and they lecture the rest of us normal people on how to live our lives and be morally correct.
Male feminists are basically SJWs these days.
He posed as one, didn’t he?
Either way, there’s a serious rape culture issue in male feminism.
why is EAs fault here? studio needed 60m to make the game and they barely covered expenses if that so not sure why is EA to blame here? i mean i know thats what popular to do..
Because they wasted at least half of that money on an excessive, unnecessary marketing campaign “because more money this way.”
Triggered 2017
are you saying marketing is unnecessary now? or that the way they went about it was wrong?
Dunno about others but I been replaying dead space games and for me the second and the third are the best lol , especially with coop I played with friend and it was a blast
You’re mandated by internet law to despise the third Dead Space. While claiming it’s not as good as the second, followed by a snide comment about how the second happens to be worse than the first. Report to a local internet officer immediately with your “Opinion”.
have a thumbs up, but seriously the second and third turned into action games with less atmosphere and less audio logs, if that doesnt make them worse i dont know what does.
Different, not worse. You expect the main character of those games to find himself trapped in similar space stations with similar threats and atmosphere? That would make the main character an idiot who never learned his lesson of going on abandoned/non-responsive space stations.
Cry more bro
I imagine even aliens colonial marines could be a blast with a friend too.
Watching grass grow is better with someone else.
I played that game with a buddy on release day, we laughed and quit after 40 min.
you crazy. The first is the best by far. The other 2 dont have as much style and atmosphere as the first.
I m not saying first was bad, I just disliked that the main character doesnt talk, thats the only problem I had with it
Loved me some dead space. Still waiting for when I can pay full price for a 4th. One of the only game series I won’t wait for 50% or more off before looking at it.
Blog about it bro.
Damn that is insane 🙁 , so if the the game sold @ $79.99 CND x 4 million that is 320 million dollars minus 60 million = $260 million profit!? I am not sure my math is right but even if I dump a 100 million for some crazy error, that still be 160 million profit which seems freaking incredible to me!
Man what type of profit do they want to make? I would think even making a million profit on a game would help and be epic, heck why not a $100K that would seems amazing to me, if only I could do that with my game when it releases… crazy.
Note I am a indie dev so maybe I live in a different world, $50K seems like wining a lottery to me and a reason to live LOL 🙂
This.
Well, there was the marketing cost too but just making a little profit doesn’t please the shareholders of EA when they can make far more investing their money in other games.
I blame gamers for not supporting DS1 and DS2 more. PUBG has, what, 10mil users and Overwatch has like 40mil? Publishers fish where the fish are biting. You can’t invest $60mil into a game for 4 mil sales, many of which were probably on discount.
I got DS1 and DS2, loved them both, but didn’t support DS3 with the co-op crap. EA was dumb for going the exact opposite direction the franchise should’ve went, but they figured “Gamers like this co-op pew-pew stuff, so maybe they’ll like it in Dead Space?” Their wasted investment and we lost a great franchise with limitless potential.
As has been said before, nobody needs to invest $60 million into a game, though, as at least half of that went to an overly-bloated marketing campaign that was completely unnecessary.
Especially as, Dead Space was (originally) a horror game. Horror has never been known to top sales charts so EA expecting otherwise by throwing money at the marketing department & expecting a sizeable return on that investment is on them, not on Dead Space or the consumer. And yeah, they made a major mistake with the co-op thing, that was a big fad at the time, as I recall.
Very silly all around. DS1 and DS2 were still great, so there’s that. If anything, I hope DS3’s failure was a big mallet smash over EA’s–and other publisher’s–heads to lay off the damn co-op/MP crap in every game.
Dead Space 3, Mass Effect 3, etc. It wasn’t one game that did it, but it was a lot of them together, yeah.
I really enjoyed Dead Space 1 and 2 but not so much DS3. EA has a habit of rushing Developers to finish games and I think either DS3 was rushed or the Developer just figured the series would help sell DS3 and didn’t put in enough effort. The difficulty was too imbalanced. It was a cake walk most of the time and some levels it just seemed tedious to get through. Like the necromorphs knocking you down and the painfully slow animation to stand up and meanwhile being mobbed by necros and then by the time you could aim and take a shot you get knocked down again. The loot drops weren’t thought out very well either. I remember once I ran out of ammo and I had about 20 health packs and the drops kept coming up health packs or anything other than ammo for the entire level. The hacking mini game wasn’t intended for M&K.
It was literally put together in 24 months (DS2 – January 2011, DS3 – February 2013), so I’m betting on rushed as hell.
Well – the game with the budget of 60 million needs to sell at least 1 mil copies of Day 1 60 USD sales to reccuperate the team cost. But then you have there another departments, someone needs to make money so managers can get their year bonuses etc. etc. It’s the same in every corporate industry in the world.
There are lots of leeches in the company. But it’s your choice. You can go work there, or be a mere contractor (if your contract allows you to do that) or you can go indie, or you can go build apps etc. Possibilites are endless for the developer (programmer mostly)
Btw, South Park Fractured But Whole has been already cracked.
Thats not news bro, the fact another scenegroup cracks denuvo is the news. Denuvo and uplay take more timem thats why it wasnt cracked on day one.
But whole has a crack.
the series deserved better in general but they kept droping the ball. The first was supposed to be system shock 3, they turned it into a console game, the second was an action game and the third, the less we talk about EA business practises:The game, the better.
I bought Dead Space 2 twice. first on xbox 360 and then on PC via Origin… (it was on sale)
I’m mad that I will never get a sequel because of EA’s stupidity.
Dead Space 1 and 2 were really good games. A shame that the third one didn’t follow suit.Dead Space and Visceral deserved better.
ugh. i really loved the first two games thats too bad 🙁