Quote:
Originally Posted by stevew
Is DJ Hero a big time bust? Cause every store I go into seems to have like a thousand copies of it lying around.
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Penny Arcade had a comment on Activision's Q4 offerings that I think hits the mark pretty squarely.
Instead of creating a good game and then setting the price, they started with the price - "$120!" - and then tried to work backwards from there. With DJ Hero, they run into the additional obstacle of creating a "Hero" game that is not intuitively accessible. Just about anybody can pick up a pair of drumsticks, a plastic guitar, or, hell, a microphone, and figure out in pretty short order which end is up.
A turntable is another matter. If you do not already have an interest in being a DJ, you are probably either going to ignore the game entirely, or fiddle with it for five minutes and lose interest. And if you paid $120, you're going to be pissed enough that the franchise will have negative cachet with you from then on.
They're going to have to take a bath on DJ Hero in order to build any kind of market share for the DJ extension of the brand going forward, and they probably should have planned for that bath in the first place. It isn't as if the core Hero brand, Call of Duty franchise, and World of Warcraft franchise aren't making them buckets of bank in the first place.