How well do text sims sell?

[GoSeahawks]

Anybody have a clue on how many copies a game like FOF sells each year? Or any other text sim like OOTP?

I've been curious for a while, but I've never bothered to ask. It seems like the market is quite small and doesn't get much publicity. Most people I know outside of the online world don't know that text sims exist.

[sabotai]

My uneducated ballpark guess would be anywhere from 2000 to possibly 6 or 7,000. And we know CM sells like a monster over in Europe (100,000+ copies, at least).

[Mac Howard]

>Most people I know outside of the online world don't know that text sims exist.

I think that's because no one in the US has yet convinced a mainstream publisher to publish offline and make a genuine effort to promote it.

Between 1982 and 1992 the soccer management game was in much the same position. There were 4 or 5 individual, mail-order author/publishers and around 2000 games was the normal yearly sale for each. We all tried to convince mainstream publishers to take them on - I spoke with both Atari and US Gold (the first only wanted "platform games" and the second told me "this is far too complex for the general public").

But in 1992 the Collyer brothers (now SIGames) managed to persuade a second level mainstream publisher (Domark) to publish Championship Manager. The magazine reviews crucified it but within 3 weeks it went to the top of the Gallup sales charts, stayed in the top five for around 6 months (three weeks is about normal) and CM now sells around 750,000 copies a year if Marc is telling us the truth.

I see no reason why the likes of FOF and OOTP can't do something similar although I think they have to make some compromises on the arid presentation of the game and give it a little more general appeal. CM has shown that you can do that without compromising the depth of the game. Though CM has enormous popular appeal I don't hear many gamers complaining about the lack of depth or selling out to popularity.

[Ramzavail]

I think it is impossible for FOF or OOTP to ever sell as much as CM did or can.

FOF, OOTP have to compete against EA, Sony, Microsoft with their console games.

CM had to compete with nobody (at least nobody important) in the early 90s - They were the only football/soccer game in the industry back then. Theyve only had competition recently with EA and Konami.

[sabotai]

Well, one reason I don't think FOF or OOTP will sell as well as CM is because american football and baseball do not have the worldwide popularity that soccer has. Also, SIGames has several people working on CM, and FOF and OOTP are for the most part solo projects (with OOTP having help from Andreas).

[WussGawd]

I think it is impossible for FOF or OOTP to ever sell as much as CM did or can.

FOF, OOTP have to compete against EA, Sony, Microsoft with their console games.

CM had to compete with nobody (at least nobody important) in the early 90s - They were the only football/soccer game in the industry back then. Theyve only had competition recently with EA and Konami.

I disagree.

I have to admit that what got me into the text sim genre was Fantasy Football, which I played for years. But I got tired of leagues where the owners dropped out, leagues where owners just kind of packed it when their team started the season 1-7, tired of not being able to keep my team together more than 2 or 3 years before a league folded.

To me the allure of FOF was to take a team, season after season, and try to keep it at or near the top of the league, and win the occasional title. Not every gamer wants eye candy, and there are an awful lot of rotogeeks in this world who could easily be sold on a good text sim, since rotisserie is little more than that at its face value.

I'm curious how well Baseball Mogul sells these days. I see copies of the latest version each year every time I walk into the local Wal-Mart. Granted, it's watered down compared to OOTP, but the fact that one can walk into the largest retailer in the world and pluck a copy off the shelf at $19.95 has to mean something, and its sold by a third tier publisher.

I think a FOF type game, with a slick interface, and sold through one of the bigger publishers (even as a bargain title), could potentially draw a large audience. Madden large, as in several million copies in the first month? Maybe not, but with the right interface, a slick box, some marketing dollars, I could see such a game selling half a million. Maybe more, if it spread by word of mouth.

[sabotai]

I'm not sure abotu that many copies. Madden on the PC usually doesn't break 100,000 copies, so I don't think a text sim would. But, I do think that a $20 price tag found in EB, Best Buy, Walmart, etc. would definatly put in ito the 20,000+ range, maybe up to 50,000. (FPS Football in it's best year didn't go over 150,000 sold).

[Ramzavail]

I disagree.

I think a FOF type game, with a slick interface, and sold through one of the bigger publishers (even as a bargain title), could potentially draw a large audience. Madden large, as in several million copies in the first month? Maybe not, but with the right interface, a slick box, some marketing dollars, I could see such a game selling half a million. Maybe more, if it spread by word of mouth.

Theres no way FOF or OOTP would sell even close to that.

The casual fan would:

-Rather play on a console - easier to sit in front of a TV as opposed to a computer desk/monitor, better for multiplayer, controls/controllers are better.
PC games aren't even close to selling as much as console games either.

-Be more interested in eye candy rather than statistical accuracy and realism.

-Buy from companies they know - EA, Microsoft, Sony.

The casual fan makes up for the majority of sports game purchases - we are in the minority here at FOF Central - we desire more from our games, strong AI, statistically accuracy and realism, grasp of the whole GM/coach experience.

The thing with CM is different, I saw them as pioneers in their sport in the gaming community - If you wanted to play soccer/football video game, you bought from them - They were the precendent.

[Easy Mac]

The thing is, the first CM was done by 2 people, and it sold insanely well. While I don't see FOF or OOTP doing that kind of business, with the right connection, it could sell pretty well.

[Mac Howard]

No, you're quite wrong in saying that CM had the market to itself when it came out. A few months earlier a game called The Manager was released by US Gold. It was a development of a Bundesliga game produced in Germany and had had some success there. In addition there was a game called Graham Taylor's Football Challenge again released a few months earlier. This second had the marketing advantage of a tie-in with the England national team manager of the time.

Both these games were far more graphically oriented than CM. They both had excellent reviews, sold very well initially but faded just as quickly when CM came out. If one accepts what appeared in the letters pages of the magazines, CM succeeded where those two didn't because it was the first "management game" that didn't cowtow to the market's insistance on graphics - the first mainstream management game to insist on the depth of the game at the expense of the graphical qualities.

Even then it was not without competition. A game called Premier Manager came out (it may even have been slightly earlier) which, from the number of copies I saw on retailers' shelves, outsold CM for perhaps a couple of years.

But CM was always seen as the genuine/pure "management game" precisely because it prioritised gameplay and eschewed graphics and eventually eclipsed Premier Manager (which didn't have graphics but the presentation was much superior).

Of course, the situtation is the same today with the EA offering.

I see no reason at all why Americans would be less interested in a FOF or OOTP type game than the British were in smgs. I think CM was lucky in that it was a second level publisher that they found who gave them much more marketing effort than they would have got from the premier publishers. And then, when CM had become popular, that publisher was taken over by Eidos - a premier publisher - who no longer needed convincing of the success of the game and put the full power of their marketing department behind it.

One the the guys who had been selling mail-order when CM came out persuaded another company to publish his game a couple of years later. By then CM and Premier Manager were fully established and I suspect selling upwards of 100,000 each but, despite poor marketing from the company (which eventually went into liquidation), that game too sold over 50,000 games - though the designer tells me he was only paid for 10,000 :rolleyes:

There's a big market out there for this type of game - that's why I stick at it ;)