Towerfall "sold a measly 7,000 copies"

[arcticdog]

Artic,

You bring up playcast and say they have been around 7 years. Another Mod was comparing ouya to monoprice. That's part of my gripe, ouya isn't focused on building a foundation with things like customer service, building positive PR and earning a spot in the market. They are trying to force their way into the market. Everything they do is more about hype than it is about actual results.

If by force, you mean disrupt, then that's not a bad thing. Netflix did the same thing and you see where they are today. You just identified the strategy of nearly every start up (especially kickstarter ones) I've ever seen.

Journalists aren't making these numbers up these are numbers that Matt provided so I'm not sure what that was all about. You bring up speculation but then you speculate that ouya must be doing OK because Their morale SEEMS FAIRLY high????

Journalists don't have all of the information needed to make factual bold claims about the health of the company or imply any degree of success about the game. They have one number. An approximate units sold provided by Thorson who's current focus couldn't be further from OUYA if he tried. But he didn't provide where his break even point was. By Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft standards, I agree... 7000 is abysmally low because of the units that are available to carry the title. But for a low budget game wasting it's critical release time on a console that was just barely shipping units, 7000 isn't horrible. It translates to a 6 figure gross. Again.. FEW games like Towerfall ever make that on ANY platform. Towerfall is a special case because of the marketing assistance given to it from day one by OUYA and then by Sony.

I didn't just say their morale is high.. I said their doors are also still open.. Julie has said they are growing.. and that the company is in good health. Have you ever worked for a small company that's circling the drain before or known anyone that has? Key people abandon ship in droves. So far with OUYA, only *ONE* relatively key person has left the company and that was months ago.

Again it doesn't matter if ascension is a different game or not. It doesn't matter what the name of the games is or what its about or how many players can play it or how much it cost. All that is needed to know is that best selling games on ouya only sell 7,000 copies per year.

Except Matt himself tweeted that he felt weird about that interview. Specifically the bit about best selling game. He's not even sure.
https://twitter.com/MattThorson/stat...51448285102081

To be fair, it was probably true at one point when OUYA hadn't quite shipped all the units. It was more or less a launch title. But it hasn't been in the top of the O-Ranking in ages.

Credit is a HUGE deal when you actually start doing the math. There are only about 450 paid games, best selling games only have 7,000 sells a year, if you do the math about how many total game sells have taken place and the average price per game you will see that ouya console owners haven't added much more than what ouya put in. While it has continue to sell I guarantee its slowed considerably, and so has how much game credit is out their. Without that $780,000 in the system there would be far less total sells.

It's a cost of doing business. Once you get past the whole 7,000 = Towerfall = best selling game thing, you'll see where things don't quite add up. Given his tweet I cited above, that was his own opinion by his own admission. Assuming that credit got spent by everyone, and Towerfall is the best selling game, why didn't we see more than 7,000 sales out of 60,000ish issued credits? The point I was making is that those credits went to other games in the market or weren't spent at all. By fireballs math, that means any game that's 6999 units or less qualifies to be a non-best selling game. It's not like Towerfall is one of a dozen games on Discover. There are plenty of places where that credit could find a home. And there are plenty of games that aren't one-time unlock kinds of things.

That's why it's really irrelevant. The purpose of the loss leader is to kickstart sales. OUYA did it as a PR gesture because of the delivery trouble. You have no indication of how many of the other games in Discover are selling thousands of units, how many of those are from the credit, and you don't know how many customers on OUYA are "whales" and spend way more than the average customer. So no.. the credit doesn't matter. It's money spent. It doesn't matter that it was gifted or if someone waits for a sale to spend it. You're trying to make something out of nothing that has a hold on the health of the company or at worst trying to imply that OUYA buys all of their user's games so they can't possibly be doing well. Again, I'll cite Netflix. Every new user gets a credit that they don't have to pay back. That doesn't make them any less profitable, nor do the content providers see less money over it. Its purpose is to encourage people to buy something by giving something. It's a strategy that is used and works everywhere from online services to fast food.

While we see new games coming out everyday we also send the level of games and the quality of games coming out, most but not all suck. What I also see everyday is people complaining about some game that was supposed to come out but decided screw ouya and 7,000 sells a year. Like I said before the ouya is minor leagues. People who know nothing about game making can come here and out out crap until they have learned on the job enough to possibly make it to the big leagues. Yeah that's great for those 1 out of 34,000 devs but sucks when you have a hand full of OK games and 95% crap as a gamer.

I won't get into the game quality level here because that's been beaten to death. Flamepanther has pointed out numerous times that EVERY platform is an ocean of crap with the occasional shining title. He's completely correct. Walk through any of the catalogs from A to Z and you're going to find about the same good to crap ratio.

Titles get canceled and delayed on platforms all the time. Or they get a better deal somewhere else. Or some final agreement goes out the window. Or key people leave and it's up in the air. The recent Spiderman movie game on the X-Box One is an example.

But regarding OUYA's problems with those companies, I'm sure they have their reasons. Some of them may actually be what your concern is. But I'd guess that's not 100% of the case. Tell Tale games, for instance, has been absolutely silent about the OUYA release, and I know Killswitch and others have poked and prodded them for an answer. They actively avoid answering it when people bring it up to them. Which probably means there's something somewhere that forbids the comment. A comment made by a mod on their forum late last month implied that the OUYA version wasn't released and so spoilers of the game weren't going to be tolerated. But then.. she's also not an employee.

Regardless.. If OUYA is such an unimportant console, and a bridge they don't mind burning, why would it be so unreasonable to say "No. We changed our minds."? If companies truly decided to screw OUYA, they would. But they would not be unresponsive to customers inquiring about it unless there's a good reason not to be responsive.

Can you please link a handful of articles that have official quotes from OUYA inc or the developers that give SELLS numbers?

I looked and found some about downloads but not sells. Plus you say articles that are a year old and ouya is only a year old. Its towerfall has been widely publicized as one of the best selling ouya games of all time and after Matt made his comments Julie made comments and you can tell she was bothered by matt's comments but didnt deny it was their best selling game. It would have been very easy and to her benifit to bring up other games that sold just as much if not more, then she can say that they consistently do for devs what they did for Matt, but nope she didn't deny or anything.

This is exactly what I've been trying to get across to you. You've been painting some doomsday scenario over a single anecdotal sample from a guy not really that focused on OUYA who's not even sure his quote of "best selling" title is correct.

You've seen Julie's communication style enough to know that not every comment means something positive for OUYA and that OUYA frequently doesn't comment on a lot of things. So it shouldn't be too much of a surprise. I agree it would be nice if that weren't true. But it is what it is.