That's a good point.
But if we can assume that marketing was far less noticeable, as most sales had already passed, and it would make little financial sense to throw hundreds of thousands into campaigns when the biggest sale spike is already behind.
Sooo, I don't think there's too much difference. Maybe in small scale, making some smaller social media marketing campaigns maybe... but it's not like 1 month after launch you can reach a lot of new people who weren't aware of that title.
It could be totally different scenario with smaller studios where they don't have such marketing budgets to even cause these millions of unit sales, so it could be more gradual for them where they keep trying to gain eyeballs by buying up Twitch streamers for sponsored gameplay content.
I'd love to bring out marketing budgets into discussion, but I don't think such data exists for public, so we'll just have to assume it's pretty even.
I want to be corrected with numbers.
Not by claims that making comparisons is pointless. If we can't agree that numbers matter there's not going to be much of a fruitful dialogue.
"People are individuals" has been thrown around thousands of years, and yet there has always been those being able to somehow manage groups of individuals as if they weren't. Every person has their own faith and yet they all have been going to same Church.
I'm sure you do.
That's what you want.
I want your numbers to prove you right.
But we don't always get what we want.
I would want you to start by understanding that the numbers aren't useful - because not only are you talking about a single case as some kind of statistically significant evidence - that's about a game that came out at an entirely different time, for two console platforms instead of 4 consoles, PC and Stadia - and you utterly ignore all other factors that would seem highly relevant, including the current pandemic, the other games released around the same time, and so forth.
What's even less useful is your inability to see that the "evil media" isn't focused on the drop in sales alone - but the way they reflect being below market expectation to a significant degree - which is the real issue with such a drop. But I guess such trivial details are not of much concern to you.
Beyond that, you provide zero sources for your numbers. You provide some kind of slides in a foreign language.
According to Wiki - GTAV had sold around 34 million copies by August 2014 - which is 7 months after your claim of 32.5 copies in 2013.
So, your very first "numbers" sentence contradicts what Wiki is saying - and you have no source.
Not only is your entire point a complete failure of appreciation for how reality works (hint: it goes beyond slides and made-up numbers) - your numbers alone are in question. But that's not terribly interesting, as even if your numbers matched up and were correct - they'd be useless for the reasons given.
Anyway, again, this is pointless. You're obviously not listening.
You're going to keep repeating "I want numbers to prove me wrong".
You might as well be asking for water melons to prove you wrong. It's probably not going to happen, and even if I did prove you wrong - we've already established that your standard of evidence is so far removed from reality that there's no way you'd be able to recognize being wrong even if the god of slides and statistics descended from the heavens and stamped the number "0" on your forehead.
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