Legendary Game Sales

[El Gato of Rome]

How do I get higher game sales? I Haven't been able to break pass 700k total sales and i top out at 20k sales/week. I release 98+%, release so i can get the holiday/awards sales bonus and dev addons to boost sales but it never passes those weekly sales and barely break 500k on most games. I also only cycle through 3-4 IPs. Anyone have any tips or know what im missing?

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Honestly, I don't look at sales anymore, only at profit. As long as my games give me back as much as I spent in them, they're fine (meaning, if a game cost me a million to develop, it better gives me at least a million of profit by the end of its shelf life.)

Also, sales depend on what platforms you're targeting (look at active users and tech level not at market share,) the publishing method you use (NPCs give more sales the higher their "market strength" is, and your games will sell more the lower you sell them for,) your fans (the less you have, the less you'll sell,) and the era you're at - it's all but impossible to sell 20k copies of a game per week in 1976, but easy after the 2000s.

Anyhow, to maximize sales, you need to make sure your game gets all the bonuses. Quick IP cycling only matters until your IPs hit 5 stars, once all your IPs are at 5 stars, using one IP or thirty makes no difference, except that games of the same IP and same type being in the market at the same time do affect each other's sales negatively (so ideally, as far as sales go, you want to only have one game, one budget and one spin-off out per IP.)

Add-ons do add sales, but their effect is best if done ASAP. If you're not releasing four add-ons with all choices selected the month after the game's released, you're not maximizing their effect.

Anyhow, all that won't make you rich. If you start caring about trends and holiday buffs and which genre or IP to release next just to favor a cosmetic value of no real relevance, you'll be stunting your profit - the one thing you'll want to have at its highest.

[El Gato of Rome]

Originally posted by Kyouko Tsukino:

Honestly, I don't look at sales anymore, only at profit. As long as my games give me back as much as I spent in them, they're fine (meaning, if a game cost me a million to develop, it better gives me at least a million of profit by the end of its shelf life.)

Also, sales depend on what platforms you're targeting (look at active users and tech level not at market share,) the publishing method you use (NPCs give more sales the higher their "market strength" is, and your games will sell more the lower you sell them for,) your fans (the less you have, the less you'll sell,) and the era you're at - it's all but impossible to sell 20k copies of a game per week in 1976, but easy after the 2000s.

Anyhow, to maximize sales, you need to make sure your game gets all the bonuses. Quick IP cycling only matters until your IPs hit 5 stars, once all your IPs are at 5 stars, using one IP or thirty makes no difference, except that games of the same IP and same type being in the market at the same time do affect each other's sales negatively (so ideally, as far as sales go, you want to only have one game, one budget and one spin-off out per IP.)

Add-ons do add sales, but their effect is best if done ASAP. If you're not releasing four add-ons with all choices selected the month after the game's released, you're not maximizing their effect.

Anyhow, all that won't make you rich. If you start caring about trends and holiday buffs and which genre or IP to release next just to favor a cosmetic value of no real relevance, you'll be stunting your profit - the one thing you'll want to have at its highest.

I make a profit but im also going for the legendary achievements. So i need to hit 50 million copies sold. i make a profit but not a big enough to buy any other studios either. i just have a slow crawl where i cant catch up to studios worth

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Buying studios in Legendary is a money drain, so don't worry about it.

You may be spreading yourself thin - I never have problems with money, but I don't spread out wasting money on marketing, support, consoles, training. I also only buy the platforms I know will be at the top four at some point, and only research the things I use when I'm going to use them. I don't have an immediate need for QA since I know all the slilders and genre/topic combos I'll use, for example, so I only research it after 1980, when not having it will start to negatively affect reviews. I don't research B+ until 1985 (lowest threshold where I've ever needed to use that size) I don't research console making, I rarely buy a license. So I'll always have the money I need for the things that are really needed.

"A dollar saved is a dollar earned."

As for the Legendary achievements, some of them seem to be meant as post-endgame "bored now don't know what to do next" goals. Reaching fifty millions sales is impossible before the 2000s, but should be easy enough after 2050, as by then you should have tens or even hundreds of millions of fans (the heaviest sales booster) and the available platforms will have magnitudes more active users than they have in the 2000s. Also, review scores should be very lenient since the threshold stops increasing by 2030, and after that, as long as you're hitting 35k points in everything and not "experimenting" with new topics or genres, you have yourself a 90%+ game, very likely to be 98%-100%

Not having the achievements during a run will not affect you at all - the 1% to some random, usually unconnected stat is negligible. Even managing to get all the achievements in one run will be, by the time you get them all, such a pitiable boost (often to things best ignored,) that it might as well not exist.

[SaimeZX]

To put into respective in my legendary playthrough I got the achievement for 50m units sold of a game in 2033. Console one in 2027.
So the game was on 4 platforms all with 80m+ active users, eventually you'll reach it

[CalypsoSun]

its not hard but you need to make sequels on a succesful IP with spin-offs. i usually start achieving at least 2M in sales on most titles in that IP around 2018 if i start in 2002-2005 and release ever 1-2 years. (for example i did a "call of duty" type franchise, but it was "Mafia" and i first 8 titles did bad, less than 1.5M and then it picked up. dont worry! i usually carry 12 IPs together and 4-5 subsidiaries

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Just in case: You can release spin-offs and sequels as often as you want. They'll lower each other's sales if done too close, and they'll gain IP slower, but one of the ways to steamroll through the start of the game is to release one game per month under the same IP. The threshold for sequels is one year, so just release twelve spin-offs of the same IP (or port some of them from/to arcades) so that a sequel to any of the spin-offs doesn't happen less than one year after its prequel. The threshold for spin-offs is six months, but this only ("apparently") affects the first round of spin-offs. Sequels to spin-offs are just "sequels" and only affected by its direct prequel, not other spin-offs.

The faster you release games - ideally above 90%, better if above 95% - the faster you'll reach a point where money doesn't matter anymore, so you can start fooling around with 30+ IPs if you want to, or stay with B games until 1995 because you simply are too rich to care about low profit per game. Or throw money away at some RNG-given-name that will develop 40% games now and then even though they're five-star studios.

And since more games out also equals gaining more fans per week, it contributes to future games selling more, even if not under the same IP. And if you release a few good (90%+) games, any game (not including budget or port) released under that IP will start at 60 hype, so you can either just release it with that hype (which may grow up to 70+ on its own,) use special marketing or full marketing to get the most out of each game as far as sales go.

There's one other thing a lot of people don't realize: If you time things right so at least one year (but not much longer than one year) passes between a prequel and its sequel, by the time the sequel is out, the prequel will already be in its death throes, and the sequel's sales will be barely, if at all, affected. Games have a very obvious sales decay mechanic that cannot be stopped, only delayed. MMOs have a better formula, where they can be kept around for a much longer time through add-ons, but even MMOs will eventually reach a point where keeping them around is not worth the effort.

In any case, releasing games quickly under the same IP can boost your IP to 5.0 rather quickly (seems to happen a lot quicker once your studio is 5.0, too,) so you'll reach the maximum possible sales for it quicker. If you're looking for the 50 million sales achievement, then releasing games in a "realistic" fashion is just going to make you take longer to get there. Your fans don't care if "Stories Of Imaginaria* 28" comes out thirteen months after "Stories of Imaginaria 27" or that it comes out the month after "Stories of Imaginaria Kart 22" was released. They'll buy your games like the brainless zealots they are programmed to be.

* Not based on a real IP. At all. ;)