Maybe Micro-Transactions And Action Wasn’t A Good Idea For Dead Space 3

Since the launch of Dead Space 3 and Crysis 3, one game has sold double the amount of the other. And yes, it’s the one with micro-transactions.

Dead Space 3 launched two weeks before Crysis 3, where sales for the two games sits at 605,000 for Dead Space 3 and 260,000 for Crysis 3–in February. Two weeks of extra sales really amounted to that much of a change.

Perhaps it was the “bad” publicity of micro-transactions.

To compare the games, 2.94-million people invested in Crysis 2, where only 2.85-million invested in Dead Space 2. That means that Crysis is the more popular franchise. Following that, Crysis 2 scored an average of 85 on Metacritic were Dead Space 2 scored 88. It’s basically the exact same score.

Dead Space 3′s sales is 26.6% worse than that of Dead Space 2, as it stands. Perhaps micro-transactions and a more ‘action-orientated’ outset wasn’t a good idea. Maybe it was something else.

Crysis 3′s sales seem to be a little better than Dead Space 3, if you assume that the sales for the games were spread out evenly for the days they were released. It seems review scores for predecessors aren’t that important, too.

Previously on eGamer, we’ve spoken about micro-transactions quite a bit. We’ve had contrasting views from authors. My belief is that it isn’t that bad–it offers something to players who want it, and leaves those who don’t want it alone. It works both ways.

The main argument about it is, “it breaks immersion.” Fair enough, that is somewhat true, however is that really such a problem? Saying “Press X” isn’t really going to change much and break much immersion.

We’ve had worse things.

I for one find that killing hordes and hordes of enemies to be a worse thing than micro-transactions. That’s just a cop-out to make games longer than they should be. More enemies, same price.

Companies want to make money, and the only way to maximise on a limited-playability game is to add something like micro-transactions. Best part, you don’t need to participate.