8 Mar, 2011
EA CEO John Riccitiello, has this week spoken of his satisfaction with the sales of blockbuster title Mass Effect 2 via the Playstation Network, sighting that they account for a ‘meaningful’ percentage of the games total sales to date. The previously 360 exclusive sequel was released simultaneously in a boxed disc version and for download when it first appeared for PS3 back in January to hugely possitive critical reception.
The PSN downloadable version of the game priced at £45 and sporting a hefty 12GB demand of your hard drive, supposedly had ‘absolutely nothing’ done for it in terms of marketing but accounts for a handsome ‘double digit’ figure in the overall percentage of units sold to date for the Playstation 3.
“This was really more about proving it can be done than it was proving what the opportunity would be,” he added. “So an unmarketed game one year after the original was done on the Xbox and the PC, we released the PS3 and managed to do very, very well with it.”
Riccitiello also spoke of how Mass Effect 2 marked a first for Sony in terms of released the retail and digital copies side by side from day of release, saying that Sony were initially cautious about doing so and had treated Mass Effect 2 as a ‘technology test’. According to the CEO, the reasoning behind a lack of releases of this nature are due in large part to the retail policies adopted by both Microsoft and Sony:
“They have got to manage both selling boxes at retail, and it’s generally a pretty thin margin business,” he explained. “And so they basically negotiate and leverage shelf space on the promise of making retail margin on software.”
Mass Effect 2 is available now for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.
Source: CVG
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