Skepticism And Marketing

I’ve spent enough time around marketers at this point to have a healthy skepticism of a sector that is notoriously difficult to track with any degree of accuracy.  A lack of solid data, reliable and accurate metrics, and a heavy reliance on correlation over provable makes me somewhat dubious of claims that marketing campaigns have been the most important factor in any game’s particular success.  So like Tracey John, I don’t doubt that the RE5 campaign had a lot of effort behind it… but I think I’m a little more skeptical than EEDR appears to be that it was the deciding factor in its popularity.

RE5 has sold about 5 million copies worldwide, including 2 million in the US.  But if you look at sales figures for RE4, which was the most recent breakout title in the series, you can see that it sold 3.6 million copies, despite being released on just the Gamecube and, much later, the PS2.  Needless to say, the GCN didn’t have the greatest reach in the world, while the late release for the PlayStation meant that it was obscured by newer and higher-profile titles.  There was enormous publicity around RE4, which no doubt spurred a lot of awareness of the series’ new direction at the time.

So it doesn’t seem like a huge reach to say that a large-scale and simultaneous release of the next game on the 360 and PS3 should probably get a boost as well.  The fact that it was reasonably high profile probably helped… but the increase doesn’t seem that improbable when accounting for the above, even without a brilliant marketing campaign.  I don’t want to minimize the efforts of Capcom staff, but Resident Evil wasn’t exactly a sleeper series.