Lucasarts sales figures

[SlipGun]

I'm interested in seeing just how much money they've made off each game, in both US and international sales.

 

Anyone?

[timfandango]

well sure, im interested bcause it may give us a fair idea which games will have a sequel due to it's predecessor (thats the correct word to use right?).

[SlipGun]

In an interview to one of France's main video games newspapers, Tim Schafer, the man behind Grim Fandango, had that typically sad-but-true statement: "Putting aside its qualities, Grim was a commercial setback. Our previous title, Full Throttle, sold much more copies. That's a point we forgot when designing Grim Fandango: people want to play what they dream of, and they dream more of being a biker who fights a lot than they dream of being dead and lost."

That might explain why Grim actually is an underdog. But let's forget objectivity for a second: THAT'S SUCH A SHAME! This game surely is a masterpiece, which drastically increases the quality level of adventure productions. And my opinion is that this is for a fair part due to its plot, which carries the player to the dark and odd "land of the dead".

 

If you read some of my earlier columns on the game industry, you hopefully have been disabused of the notion that PC games sell in large quantities normally. Yeah, Warcraft 3 got millions of pre-orders. It's newsworthy because it's so unusual. Most games would be happy to sell 50,000 units in their lifetime. Close your eyes for a moment and think of a non-mega release that you thought was really good. Picture it? Okay, that title almost certainly sold fewer than 50,000 copies.

 

Products like Battlezone, Grim Fandango and the last Secret of Monkey Island are just a couple games I know off the top of my head that did around 30,000 units. Here's another way to look at it: if the game wasn't hyped to the point that it was on the front cover of all the game mags, it probably did fewer than 50,000 copies.

 

2001 sales figures:

Escape From Monkey Island LucasArts 32,576

Tales From The Monkey Island Archive Series LucasArts 22,200

Grim Fandango LucasArts 16,157

Curse Of Monkey Island LucasArts 19,552

Escape From Monkey Island Archive Series JC LucasArts 7,858

 

Grim Fandango (Jewel Case)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: 61

 

Unfortunately, it sold like five copies and I think it gave LucasArts a bit of a scare. I mean, why should it take a risk on original or unusual games when anything Star Wars will sell just fine? I really believe the failure of Grim Fandango made the company a bit conservative for a few years.

[chrisbailey]

16,000 copies! Man that is such a shame! Grim Fandango is such a good game!

[James Isaac]

I can't believe it sold so few compared to the other games.... and if Full Throttle sold so well, why did they cancel the sequel

[Yuri]

Well, games are generally expensive in quite a few countries and usually have only a few times of replayability, so they're pretty much branded "not worth it" quite often.

 

The only country which I think is really crazy about games is Japan. I've never played Castlevania before but apparently, it's so big that it has about 10 titles under it(the only other contender is FF, if i'm not wrong) and even has a couple of singers/idols dressing up as the characters in it and it is still going on strong.

[GendoTheGreat]

Only 16,000 copies? It doesn't seem possible. Is that the sales figures from around the world, or just the US?