Sony Leaks Player Counts for PS4 Games: How Did Racing Games do?
If you have been lurking around Video Gaming new websites over the past few days, you would know that Sony has inadvertently leaked the player counts for PS4 titles. The premise is that users have a personalised statistics video generated for their Playstation Network account, and one of those stats include the player's rarest trophy, and how many other players have that same trophy. If you learnt anything from your mathematics classes in school, you would know that working out the total number of players by reverse engineering a percentage of players is a simple task.
So now we end up with some more reliable statistics than VGChartz, which are known to only take into account physical game sales. The figures look optimistic for the motor racing genre as the flagship title, Gran Turismo Sport, is estimated to have a player base exceeding 7 million, while Project Cars 2 pulling in nearly 2.5 million sales, signalling how simulators still represent a sizeable chunk of the market. Codemasters haven't broken the 7-digit barrier yet, but F1 2018 is very close with 996,000 players and DiRT 4 is not far behind with 745,000.
However, what I want to focus on is a franchise I am very much attached to and has been nothing short of controversial during this generation: Need For Speed. Things kick off with an impressive start for Rivals, which was the first PS4 game in the series racking up a total of nearly 8 million sales. What's more impressive is what the 2015 title managed to accumulate; 9.7 million sales... On a single system! The return to the Underground roots certainly proved to be popular then.
However, things went a bit pear-shaped afterwards; Need For Speed Payback only managed to pull 4.4 million sales to date. While Ghost Games still persisted with detailed customisation, a varied car list, single-player campaign and many of the tuner scene qualities fans liked about its predecessor, it's unsurprising to see how the 2017 game fell flat with a story that arguably went too over the edge (Fast & Furious springs to mind) and a game economy designed to lure the player into buying microtransactions.
The main reason why I wanted to pick up on Need For Speed is that alongside Mario Kart and the Forza Horizon series, Need For Speed is one of the most prolific titles in Arcade Racing, and it would be a shame to see it decline because of poor decisions being made. As shown with the 2015 Reboot, Ghost Games have discovered a recipe to bring the franchise back to its glory days. Build on that and we could have three, maybe more arcade racing franchises thriving for all the right reasons. And who knows, perhaps Rockstar Games could see a new Midnight Club game as a worthwhile investment...
So now we end up with some more reliable statistics than VGChartz, which are known to only take into account physical game sales. The figures look optimistic for the motor racing genre as the flagship title, Gran Turismo Sport, is estimated to have a player base exceeding 7 million, while Project Cars 2 pulling in nearly 2.5 million sales, signalling how simulators still represent a sizeable chunk of the market. Codemasters haven't broken the 7-digit barrier yet, but F1 2018 is very close with 996,000 players and DiRT 4 is not far behind with 745,000.
However, what I want to focus on is a franchise I am very much attached to and has been nothing short of controversial during this generation: Need For Speed. Things kick off with an impressive start for Rivals, which was the first PS4 game in the series racking up a total of nearly 8 million sales. What's more impressive is what the 2015 title managed to accumulate; 9.7 million sales... On a single system! The return to the Underground roots certainly proved to be popular then.
However, things went a bit pear-shaped afterwards; Need For Speed Payback only managed to pull 4.4 million sales to date. While Ghost Games still persisted with detailed customisation, a varied car list, single-player campaign and many of the tuner scene qualities fans liked about its predecessor, it's unsurprising to see how the 2017 game fell flat with a story that arguably went too over the edge (Fast & Furious springs to mind) and a game economy designed to lure the player into buying microtransactions.
The main reason why I wanted to pick up on Need For Speed is that alongside Mario Kart and the Forza Horizon series, Need For Speed is one of the most prolific titles in Arcade Racing, and it would be a shame to see it decline because of poor decisions being made. As shown with the 2015 Reboot, Ghost Games have discovered a recipe to bring the franchise back to its glory days. Build on that and we could have three, maybe more arcade racing franchises thriving for all the right reasons. And who knows, perhaps Rockstar Games could see a new Midnight Club game as a worthwhile investment...
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