DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

HALO 5: A HOLLOW VICTORY by Mr Biffo

4/11/2015

18 Comments

 
Picture
So, apparently, Halo 5 Guardians made more money in its first 24 hours on sale in the UK - £7.7 million - than the latest James Bond movie, which achieved a 'mere' £6.3 million.

​That's good isn't it? On paper it is, though quite a bit less good than the £65 million that GTA V made on its first day, back in 2013.

However, while the number of copies of Halo 5 sold hasn't yet been revealed, we do know that GTA V shifted 1.75 million units on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in its first day on sale.

Given that it made a fair bit less, and is an Xbox One exclusive, it's fair to say that however many copies of Halo 5 were sold, it wasn't as much as 1.75 million.

​Especially when you consider that there were 716,741 games sold in total last week, according to Chart-Track. Not all of those were Halo 5, obviously.


Though it's unclear exactly how many people saw Spectre last weekend, it opened on 2,500 screens in the UK, and broke box office records, with the most successful opening week in UK history. Yet the games industry seems to think Halo 5's first day takings is some measure of victory over old media.

The average cost of a UK cinema ticket is about £7. Halo 5 is currently £39.57 on Amazon. Isn't it about time that we stopped pretending that video games are more popular than... y'know... everything ever?

SOLD WELL
There's no doubt that Halo 5 has sold well... for a video game.

It made 50% more than the previous week's multiformat Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and debuted at number one in the all-formats chart.  But of course the big games stand to make more money: they can cost up to ten times as much as a cinema ticket. If I sold one bag of crisps for £10 million, it would be a chronic distortion of the facts to start crowing about how "Crisps sales make more money than the new James Bond movie!".


I've always felt games were too expensive - right back to when I had to beg my parents to give me an advance on my pocket money so I could buy Underwurlde for the ZX Spectum -  but it's a conversation that the games industry has always seemed reluctant to have. 

Admittedly, in real terms, games are cheaper now than they used to be. With Halo 5 getting discounted to under forty quid, it still costs the same as some of the bigger Mega Drive and Super NES games did back in the day. That's a good thing - and certainly makes fools out of everyone who conspired to defend the price of games back in the 90s and noughties (particularly against former Digitiser columnist Stuart Campbell's well-intentioned Fairplay campaign).

However, the games industry is still locked into the same cycle of fear: instead of selling games more cheaply, which might invite more people to play them (and thus, recoup development costs that way -  according to some reports, Halo 5 cost $250 million; $50 million more than Spectre's budget), they continue pricing them out of the pockets of most people. 

Again: Halo 5 made £7.7 million in its first day of sale, because of how much it costs to buy - not because more people bought it than went to see Spectre.
 If this is a victory, it's a hollow one. Let's call it The Lance Armstrong Effect.
Picture
VIRTUALLY NOTHING
As I've said recently, gaming does virtually nothing to invite more people to the party. Everything about games seems to conspire to speak to established audiences, and nobody is having a conversation about growing the market.

Though why would they when they can make money by selling games at £40 - £60?

​But there are new audiences out there, and the more people that play games, the more diverse the audience gets, the better it's going to be for all of us who are already here.

Think of everyone you know: your parents, siblings, friends... How many of them play on consoles regularly? How many of them would spend £50 on a game? Most people I know wouldn't dream of it. Most of them don't even have a clue what a Halo is. Games are still out of reach for most, in terms of content as much as cost.

And before you say anything... I know there are lots of cheaper, more accessible, games out there, but they're hidden away on Steam, or the PlayStation and Xbox stores, which are anything but welcoming to those who are less tech-savvy. 


GENERALISING MASSIVELY
Yet everyone - he says, generalising massively - plays games nowadays. Admittedly, the types of games most people play are free to download from mobile app stores, the modern equivalent of puzzle magazines. Nevertheless, while society understands the language of games now, it still seems to shunt them into a ghetto. Gamers continue to be "weird loners" in the eyes of the media.

There are plenty of people who already play games who don't want newcomers trampling all over their flower beds. We all know who they are, and they'll aggressively discourage anyone new, or different, or implicitly threatening to come along. And that's yet another barrier, along with uninviting advertising, the narrow focus on game genres, and price. 

Who wants to go to a party at which you assume everyone is going to be sweating in a corner, hacking away on a laptop, talking in acronyms, and hate speak? 


What's more, consoles are unwelcoming black slabs of off-putting technology, playing host to games which further fetishise technology. You're kidding yourself if you think Master Chief - a faceless, robot-looking man - is as popular, or familiar, among the general public as James Bond. Master Chief is only an icon among the already converted.


That's a huge barrier, but the price of big games is the single biggest, razorwire-topped wall in the way of games from becoming the default entertainment medium of the 21st century. 

FLOWER BEDS
The more of these barriers that can be dismantled, the better things are going to get. You're not going to stop idiots being idiots, but you might be able to convince a few more people that we're not all idiots, and that they can learn to love something new, if you reduce the price. 

We can only be convinced to try something new, if that something looks easy. It's a chicken and egg thing, and I get the fear: you don't know if lowering the price of games is too big a risk. But it will mean more games get sold, and for that to happen games need to be priced along the same lines as other entertainment products; movies, TV shows, music, books... 

Perhaps then the headlines about games sales will actually mean something, rather than feel like a proud five year-old artist holding up a terrible scrawl for her mother's approval. 

"That's lovely dear," says the mother. "What's it meant to be?"

​"Master Chief."

"That's brilliant, dear. I love Masterchef."

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
SCAREMONGERING: DOES THE GAMES INDUSTRY BRING IT UPON ITSELF? by Mr Biffo
REPEAT AD INFINITUM: Why All The New Games Are Old News by Mr Biffo
BOYCOTT STAR WARS VII: A NON-MOVEMENT by Mr Biffo

​
18 Comments
Kelvin Green link
4/11/2015 01:38:34 pm

I didn't realise it was the 104th in the Frederic series. I've never owned a MicroSoft console so I missed out on the other 103 entries in the franchise.

Well said, Biffo.

Reply
FEoD link
4/11/2015 01:54:13 pm

"How many of them would spend £50 on a game?" Forget anyone I know, *I* wouldn't even dream of spending £50 on a game (Lego, yes. A game, no...) but since the only console I own is a WiiU, the pushers from 'Sony' and 'Microsoft' can't force me to pay that price for my next 'fix'.
Folk that don't have a third way, be it PC or second hand sales, as an option kind of have to or they just have a very expensive paperweight under the telly...

Reply
Dr Kank
4/11/2015 02:20:04 pm

Rather then the price, I'd say that complicated controls are a bigger barrier to reaching a larger audience. In the past it wasn't too difficult to encourage non-gaming friends to try playing a video games, these days it just doesn't seem worth the effort. It feels like you have to commit to going through an hour long tutorial before you will even begin to enjoy playing a game.

Reply
Ben
4/11/2015 02:32:45 pm

I absolutely agree that games are too expensive and have been forever...I find it weird that gamers think nothing of regularly dropping £40-£50 on a frivolous entertainment product; I never buy anything at release and can only imagine how absurd it must seem to the non-converted.

My other gripe is that the range of formats and platforms on which to play games is also intimidating and limiting to most, and prohibitively expensive if you want to get the best from the medium. There are many games on all of the main 3 home consoles that I want to play (let's for arguments sake say that the titles I am interested in represent the best of what the medium has to offer; I'm a discerning fellow) but in order to experience them, I need to buy three machines, which in today's money would set me back about a grand, not to mention a PC if I decide I want to play games at a desk, which I don't. I can't think of another medium that requires that level of investment in order to enjoy the full range of content it has to offer; I mean imagine if films were released exclusively on separate formats and the quality of the presentation varied depending on the machine on which you played it. That would be stupid.

What really riles me about this is that 2 of the three big manufacturers actually lose money on their hardware, only recouping through publishing...Given that that's the case, why the hell wouldn't you want to market to one, huge audience who all own the same technology. It would be better for everybody involved; Devs, Publishers and most importantly, consumers if there was one format technology...and everything would be cheaper.

So there.

Reply
Col. Asdasd
4/11/2015 02:58:41 pm

It has actually sold quite badly for a video game, very badly for a Halo game and very VERY badly for a platform-defining first-party exclusive.

NeoGAF extrapolated the data provided by Ubisoft on sales of Assassin's Creed Syndicate (100k first week UK sales) and ChartTrack press release (Halo 5 outsells AC:S by 50% in first week UK) and pegged the number at about 150k.

That's about half of what Halo 3 sold at launch (when there were less Xbox 360s sold in Britain than Xbox Ones today) and the lowest ever figure for a Halo game that wasn't a remaster or compilation.

The reason the press is reporting on a comparative figure (sales vs cinema tickets) is because that's what Microsoft PR have decided to put out in their press release.

If they'd done the numbers they were expecting in terms of units sold you could expect them to shout the raw numbers from the rooftops, but the standard MO in the industry when a game bombs this hard is to dress up the story with an apples to oranges comparison.

Hats off to you Biffo for actually stopping to think about what you were reading, rather than just dutifully copying the words straight off the PR hymn sheet.

Reply
Col. Asdasd
4/11/2015 03:39:35 pm

I suppose that was tangential to the main thrust of your article though Mr. Biffo. I am puzzled about the failure to make the ends meet in terms popular acceptance of games/gamers, for all the reasons you mention. It seems that whenever we're on the cusp of bridging that gap, one party pulls back at the last moment.

The Wii was one of the most popular consoles ever, certainly on the mainstream side. People were finally able to see the wiimote as a blurring between good old telly and something else, and accepted the possibilities for fun it presented. I'll never forget the Christmas I spent with four generations all playing Wii Sports bowling together - kids, young adults, older adults and grandparents. Everyone having a great time.

But it wasn't the breakthrough it seemed. The attachment rate on the console (games sold per unit) was worse than previous Nintendo hardware. For the non-gamers it was a fad, a Christmas toy, and certainly a great success as one. For open-minded gamers it was a great 'core' console too. But the legacy of the Wii wasn't to give us that breakthrough moment.

The iPhone is another one. Orders of magnitude more people playing games than ever before! But they wouldn't admit for a second that this meant they had anything to do with traditional gaming. The device doesn't serve as a gateway into the hobby, but a wholesale replacement. These games aren't substantial (with some honexceptions), they're very much the low hanging fruit. But you can hardly blame people for reaching out for that when having something better would mean buying a whole new device.

Shows like Big Bang Theory and the IT Crowd seem like they're helping to normalise geekery, but are often so clumsy and broad-brush with it that I feel they do as much harm as good. They bring the stereotype of the introvert or the geek or the nerd into the spotlight of mainstream culture, they give it attention and catchphrases and ostensible celebration. But they also reinforce that stereotype of awkward, different people, who are to be laughed at instead of laughed with.

It's worth noting that with every successive generation the new becomes the norm, simply every social movement or new medium/technology gathers pace at a historical moment, and the prejudice that manifests against it is always distributed most heavily among populations that have existed prior to that moment. It's hard to kill a social movement, and even harder to kill a technological/media innovation. Whereas people have this pretty reliable habit of dying out. Reminder: holy shit, we're all going to die.

To this end both the people arguing in favour of mainstream integration of gaming and those arguing against it may be wasting their breath. You might as well tweet the dead god-creature Zomogo and tell him not to crash into the moon and slowly infect all life on Earth with dread madness and the terrible disease known as the Splitting Limbs. Facts are, it's happening. Get on the right side of history, or better yet, get on with something else that's more productive.

Reply
Kelvin Green link
4/11/2015 04:40:39 pm

I wish to subscribe to your Zomogo newsletter.

Andrew Gillett
4/11/2015 03:41:29 pm

Jar Jar Binks is a better character than Master Chief.

Reply
Steve McChief
4/11/2015 09:34:01 pm

That's not a fair comparison at all.

Master Chief hardly even counts as a character.

Reply
Tony
4/11/2015 07:50:33 pm

And the number of people who give a flying fuck what this shitty little site thinks? Six?

Reply
Barry Barry Barry Barry
4/11/2015 09:14:23 pm

Well. That was unnecessary.

Reply
Steve McTony
4/11/2015 09:36:48 pm

Hey, don't you go after Tony, most of don't even know what a Digitiser is. We're only here to read Tony's quality opinions.

FEoD link
5/11/2015 06:43:51 am

Watch what you're saying... Tony told me his dad is a boxer and he could beat your dad up, so unless your dad is a policeman; be warned...

Hamptonoid
4/11/2015 09:48:06 pm

The unsavoury talk about your adding up skills are clearly unfounded.

Reply
PeskyFletch
11/11/2015 04:06:24 pm

OOOooooo, just clocked off from MS Towers Tone? Or do you define yourself by your attachment to a faintly mediocre franchise?

Reply
Euphemia
4/11/2015 10:38:35 pm

That digital copies of these fuckers costs about the same as the physical copies seems a mite out of order too. On the plus side, the second hand bins seem to stock up even quicker these days given the general fatigue with these bollockbusters driving a lot of gamers to recoup some of their misplaced investment.

Reply
Mr Biffo
5/11/2015 09:28:58 am

Tony is rude.

Reply
Barry Barry Barry Barry
5/11/2015 06:40:06 pm

Well. That was unnecessary.

Or was it?

No. It wasn't.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ