Those of us who bought Crackdown for the Halo 3 multiplayer beta key got more then they bargained for. Not only did you get to play the latest Halo 3 multiplayer early, but Crackdown turned out to be a great game. It featured creative gameplay and an open world playground that took most of us by surprise. You would think developers Realtime would have laughed all the way to the bank right? Wrong.
Realtime boss man Dave Jones (not of Monkees fame) put into perspective saying “With Crackdown we sold about 1.5 million copies, but even at that we pretty much only managed to break even. It was due to the amount of factors that were out of our control as the developer, influences such as GameStop’s amazing used-game sales; we know 1.5 million new copies were sold, but it’s likely there were 2.5, three million sold when you include used.”
Ouch. 1.5 million copies and they only broke even, that’s rough. It just goes to show how much of an impact the used game business has over the gaming industry as a whole. This helps put into perspective why game developers and publishers complain about used the games sales market so much. Hopefully Crackdown 2 will fare better, at least having name recognition this time around.
