How will EA evaluate the first week sales of NCAA Football 10? Or will they? - MrHeffalump's Blog

MrHeffalump's Blog

How will EA evaluate the first week sales of NCAA Football 10? Or will they?

Posted on July 26, 2009 at 10:39 PM.

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First a history lesson, so we can see just what might be going through the head of a gaming business mogul. Top three platforms over the last three games. Sounds fair.

NCAA 2008: http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly.php?d...285&boxartz=1#

360: 300,079
PS2: 169,124
PS3: 101, 296

Total: 570,499

NCAA 2009: http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly.php?d...649&boxartz=1#

360: 290,627
PS3: 160,663
PS2: 71,288

Total: 522,578

NCAA 2010: http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly.php?d...013&boxartz=1#

360: 250,089
PS3: 149,787
PS2: 34,823

Total: 434,699

Now before I get to the gloom and doom, we'll start my favorite stage of the whole process. Denial. It's true that the PS2 isn't the platform that it once was for sales. and NCAA 09 sold 50,000 more copies than NCAA 08 on PS3, mostly from people who upgraded their hardware sometime in between.

For the other usual suspects, the overall economy could be blamed. Or you could just say the market is not cut out for sports games...

(http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly.php?date=39999&boxartz=1#)

These numbers might have you rethink that though. The top selling games? All five are sports related, even though Wii Sports could probably be considered a cheat code...

Now for the fun part. Is this really such a major drop off? The numbers would suggest so, but maybe it's been steadily coasting downhill for a while now. I'm no businessman myself, more interested in how this could affect NCAA 11 and so on in terms of the gameplay.

Madden has actually been improving in sales, though almost any OS'er would tell you that the quality of football on the field certainly hasn't. That however didn't stop Ian Cummings and the gang from putting in the time and effort to make Madden 10 the best football experience possible.

So where is the logic? Not to be harsh to the NCAA developers, but it really does seem like the college game is a throwaway project at this point. It hasn't always been that way. Just how low do the sales need to go before serious changes are made?