- 13,740
- Adelaide
- Neomone
This post I'm going to write probably doesn't belong here but anyway, there's a plethora of reasons why GT6 was never going to sell anywhere near as well as GT5:
GT5
- People have been craving a sequel to GT4 for just over 5 years
- The PS3 Slim is becoming much more affordable around the world (My 320GB PS3 cost roughly $430, (give or take $50, it was a gift) compared to $699 for a 40GB or $999 for a 60GB in 2007)
- They advertised this one substantially, tv spots, kiosks and everything!
- GT5: Prologue built up a lot of hype in the thrity-five months it had to convince people that GT5 would be like this but a zillion times bigger.
- People saw the picture below
The idea of a game that looked like that was CRAZY in 2010.
GT6
- Released after the launch of the new consoles that were the talk of the town, PS3 is an also-ran now.
- Casual players who bought a PS3 with GT5 and have played maybe two other games since then aren't interested, they've already got a racing game.
- Much less marketing, though surprisingly I did see a few televised ads.
- There wasn't much to market. Besides things that haven't been added yet, the only new thing the ads were able to capitalise on was "Hey look, Bathurst!" (a good proposition for a game in Australia) You can't exactly have a commercial that says "You should buy GT6 because it's just like GT5 except loads much faster, has a better UI, Cone challenges, easier licenses, drop-dead-gorgeous starmaps, higher dynamic range in its lighting and some really neat physics"
All true. Still, going from ~7 million in the first year to ~3 is a big drop. While some reduction in sales numbers is to be expected, I don't think anyone expected this much.
Put it this way: the only previous Gran Turismo to have sold less than 10 million lifetime is GT2, and that got to 9.5 million. If GT6 really has only sold 3 million now, can you even see it getting to half that over it's whole lifetime? Especially considering the next generation thing, which I expect may significantly shorten the long tail of sales.
You're right in that it was likely never going to sell as well as GT5. But there's a difference between "not sell as well" and "worst selling GT ever by a significant margin".