14 DAY TRIAL // One of last year's most interesting titles was Electronic Arts' Dead Space, which took the action-survival genre to a new level by introducing some interesting mechanics, in the form of dismemberment, and also in terms of space-themed horror sequences.
Developed by Visceral Games, former EA Redwood Shores, the title was praised by many reviewers, but the unfortunate release window, in the middle of the holiday season, didn't really give it a chance against many of the sequels that appeared during that same period.
However, even though the title has managed to sell about 1,5 million units, it seems that it was much more popular, with the Manager of Visceral Games, Glen Schofield, revealing that three million players were registered for consoles only. This means that it became that much more popular with gamers.
“We looked at how many we sold. We also looked at — we didn't have online which is one of the big features that you need to have to kind of keep it in the house a little bit longer these days,” Schofield said in an EA podcast. “But then we also did studies on sort of how many unique users there were on the PSN network and Xbox Live. And realized, you know what, there's over three million people that have played Dead Space. Maybe we've only sold 1.5 million or whatever the number is. But there's something there because that means that, OK, there were a lot of used sales. So there's a lot of people when I go out and talk to [them]… it seems that everybody has played it or heard about it or whatever.”
He also talked about the fact that the game not having a multiplayer mode didn't really make a lot of difference, as the team considered that the experience was worth the $60 price tag. “I think it's bang for the buck is really what we're looking at right now these days and going: OK, we came out at 60 bucks and so did some of these other games that had online that maybe people could play for 50 hours, right? Or they had tons and tons of paid downloadable content so they could play it for 40, 50 hours again. Or we were up against Fallout, which was a 50-hour game to begin with. So, we didn't look at it and say we have to have online. What we said we've got to be bang for the buck. Some people could get through our game in 10 hours or so, so we learned.”
Did Dead Space make a meaningful impact on you or do you think that the whole experience just wasn't worth your hard-earned money? Share you thoughts with us by leaving a comment.