Journey to Batuu is 50% off already...

"LiELF;c-17700338" wrote:

"drake_mccarty;c-17700215" wrote:

"LiELF;c-17700095" wrote:

"SimmerGeorge;c-17700042" wrote:

"LiELF;c-17699999" wrote:

"candy8;c-17699871" wrote:
The game is a bummer I have never seen a pack go on sale so fast must be a real dud.

Not necessarily. I believe Cats and Dogs and City Living went on sale quickly (my memory could be mistaken, it could be different EPs) but most of those have done pretty well. Just like how everyone around here assumed My First Pet flopped but it turned out to be a bestseller.

You just never really know.

Where do people get sale numbers from?

Sometimes SimGuru Lyndsay and Grant share general info, usually on Twitter. They don't give us exact sales numbers, but they will offer some insight. Lyndsay gave us a ranking list once on most played packs in their first year of release. The only ones I remember exactly was that Parenthood and Vampires were at the top of Game Packs.

To be honest though, I thought it was a strange way to word it. "Most played in it's first year of release". That still doesn't exactly say how the actual sales were. Tricky.

That makes it a bestseller? “Most played in Y1” is a figure that is wildly different for every single DLC (since sales are not consistent for every single pack, every one would have to be calculated separately) and then making a ranking list out of that data is nothing short of misleading.

Well, that's the question. How a pack performs in its first year is important. If they are gauging how many players use a pack in that first year of release, what I want to know is what aspects of a pack determine its use? Some people buy packs just to build, is that a qualifier?

They aren't going to give us sales numbers. The closest we get to that is the quarterly reports from the CEO. But that also doesn't break packs down to individual sales. So all we really have to go on for info is the vague "this did well, that went beyond our expectations", etc.

That’s kind of what I was alluding to with my post. Some of the DLC have a big install base but many claim they don’t use the gameplay content. This can negatively impact your avg depending on what kind of outcome you’re wanting. Works the other way too, small install base needs fewer people in order to maintain a higher avg.

As for what determines use: sales and scope. Doesn’t matter what players use the pack for, if it’s installed they are included in the calculation. Scope is tricky because that’s time, but also any combination of specific items. I would guess they gauge usage off of the gameplay content/features, since CAS/BB is all functionally base game content and there’s just so much generic deco that it would probably be inaccurate to consider that meaningful usage.

This is the same telemetry process that told them no one used voodoo dolls which led to them making voodoo dolls a staple feature for one of the CL festivals so people would use them more. There’s issues relying on that kind of data, and I still think making a ranking list was misleading.