Launch-Week Casualties

A game’s first week on sale is a strange verdict. It measures marketing, competing releases, the health of a platform, and the mood of a genre, and only sometimes the game itself. Three well-documented cases show how a fine game can lose that week and still win the argument later.

Beyond Good & Evil (2003). Ubisoft released Michel Ancel’s adventure in North America on November 11, 2003, the same month as its own Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, in the middle of the holiday rush. Reports from the period say Ubisoft’s marketing leaned toward the Prince. By the commonly cited figures, Beyond Good & Evil sold about 271,000 copies at US retail, and much of that came after price cuts. Meanwhile The Sands of Time reached around two million copies by the end of the year. The game with the photographer heroine, the strange hovercraft geography and a story about a media conspiracy became a cult favorite anyway. Ubisoft later released an HD version in 2011 and a 20th anniversary edition in 2023, so someone at the publisher clearly noticed.

Grim Fandango (1998). LucasArts shipped Tim Schafer’s afterlife noir in late October 1998, at a moment when the adventure game was losing its place in the market to 3D action and shooters. Critics loved it. Sales, by most accounts, were modest, and it is often cited as a factor in LucasArts stepping back from the genre. Double Fine’s remaster arrived in 2015, well over a decade later, and was the version many players first found. A genre in retreat is a market condition, not a quality judgment, and the game was caught in the retreat.

Ōkami (2006). Clover Studio’s painterly Sun Goddess adventure launched on the PlayStation 2 in 2006, when that console was near the end of its life and the PlayStation 3 was about to launch. It won wide praise but sold below Capcom’s hopes, and Capcom dissolved Clover in the same period, with key staff leaving. The game did not vanish. It was re-released for the Wii in 2008 and in HD in later years, and each time the reaction was some version of “why didn’t more people play this?”

A pattern shows up when you set them side by side. None of these games failed for a reason the games themselves could have fixed. One had a sibling launch from its own publisher, one was in a shrinking genre, and one was on a console on its way out. What those launches actually tested was timing.

It would be a mistake to romanticize all this. Plenty of games that sold poorly were also weaker games, and “misunderstood” is not a synonym for “good.” But when a game earns admiration years later and gets remastered, ported or rediscovered again and again, the original sales figure starts to look like the least interesting fact about it.

If you’re browsing a back catalog and you see a title with strong reviews and a soft commercial history, treat it as a clue rather than a warning.