Thesis Research: Why didn't Okami sell?

[jdimond18]

Hello! I'm doing my thesis on Okami, and was wondering if any of you had any ideas as to why the initial launch of this game didn't sell. Furthermore, do you remember any marketing for the original or rereleases of the game?

[Musk]

I don't know about marketing, but I always assumed one of the main causes for poor sales was releasing the game right when the new console generation was about to start.

According to Wikipedia, Okami released in April 2006, while the PS3 released in November the same year.

Also, Clover Studio who made the game were shut down a few months after its release, perhaps researching that might yield some more info.

[Doc Holiday]

cause it's too japanese

[WZ]

The generation thing may have played into a lack of marketing too. I can't recall any, maybe I got insanely unlucky, but I somehow managed to not hear of Okami even though I was an avid gamer & 100% the target audience. I absolutely loved Viewtiful Joe 1 & 2, and have always craved good Zeldas outside of the Nintendo walled garden. They could have played up the game, or the studios' chops.

Of course this was a bit of dark ages for games media, stuck between paper which was already dead, and the internet which was still in its very early youth. It was nowhere near as exhaustive / informative as it can be now. Steam, FB, YT & the like had barely been born. How would one even market well in that period, outside of spending a fortune on TV spots, I'm not sure. I suspect it wasn't a good year for new IPs. Looking at the best sellers list, it's all established franchises - except Gears of War, which did well in the US. I have a feeling it must have had TV spots.... One google later, it had a 30 minute promotional show on MTV! ^^

[Musk]

Another thing that comes to mind - Okami's a pretty colorful and easy-going game, and it released roughly in that period I call the Brown Ages - when all the games decided to ditch most of the color pallet and tried to be super serious and not at all for little kids anymore.

Best examples I found are Prince of Persia and Jak and Daxter series. Just compare the cover arts and screenshots of previous entries vs the ones from 2004 (Warrior Within and Jak 3). Then Resident Evil 4 releases next year and becomes very popular and influential, and boy is it brown.

And that was just the beginning of course, pretty much the entire PS3/Xbox360 generation was filled with brown serious games. That's what got marketed the most, that's what people were buying apparently. Perhaps one more reason why the ports (Wii, PS3) still didn't sell too well.

[ShuShay]

Didn't Twilight Princess come out in the same year?

[Orbister]

Most people think that "good graphics" is equal to photo realism, look which game won best visual style in the steam awards... Forza 5... A game that proposes NOTHING in terms of visual style, yet, normies voted it because it looks "realistic". And Okami is the opposite of that. Also playing as a dog might be a bit of a turn off.

[ShriekViola]

I'd never even heard of it until I randomly came across it mentioned on a Zelda clone / 3D metroidvania type game list about four years ago, then bought a copy off ebay. This is from someone who was still getting PS2 games up to around 2009 and pretty much sat out the PS3 / 360 / Wii gen entirely, so the release coverage of those consoles meant next to nothing to me at the time.

[mikeydsc]

Back then I used to get game demos out of mags like the Playstation mag years ago. They had disks with several demos you could try. Never heard of this game back then.

[UnfriendlyGuy01]

Because gamers have bad taste and bought crap like San Andreas, Rachet or GoW on PS2 instead

[Draconic Creature]

I'd say it's probably a mix of being released towards the end of the console's life cycle, being released in the middle of the era of brown military shooters and edgy games being the hip thing, lacking advertisement and being percieved as a kids-only game, again due to the era of games with a serious tone and a colour-palate you'd probably find have a lot of overlap with a diarrhoea-sufferer's toilet.

[PlainOlSoapBar]

I never did much research about this but I think it was because of Zelda games being so popular. This game was probably written off as a Zelda clone/bootleg before for sure, so people just went for the actual Zelda games instead. I don't know how the PS boys viewed this game but I believe it was this case for the Wii. The only way I found out about this game was years ago when I found the Wii disk for this game, don't know the reason why my family bought it. Thank ♥♥♥♥ they did though, I really like this game.

[PlainOlSoapBar]

Originally posted by ShuShay:

Didn't Twilight Princess come out in the same year?

Yeah this was probably one of the reasons

[SLAIN]

Originally posted by jdimond18:

Hello! I'm doing my thesis on Okami, and was wondering if any of you had any ideas as to why the initial launch of this game didn't sell. Furthermore, do you remember any marketing for the original or rereleases of the game?

Doesn't take much to see why.