Although Sucker Punch's inFamous was released first, both it and Radical Entertainment's Prototype were launched in close enough proximity and feature similar sandbox-type gameplay that comparisons have already been made. Both games are also of fairly high quality and received much praise from critics, with inFamous slightly edging out Prototype 84 to 80 on Metacritic.
When it comes to sales, however, Prototype has a big advantage in that it's multiplatform. EEDAR estimates that over the long haul, Prototype will outsell inFamous by 90%. That said, on the PS3, inFamous is expected to fare much better.
"Infamous is currently on track to sell 35% more than Prototype for the PlayStation 3 in North America. Lifetime sales could outpace Infamous over Prototype by as much as 50% due to the longer sales curve exclusive titles receive. Due to near identical game play and quality scores, the Infamous vs. Prototype case study presents interesting data to publishers when considering the sales bump a title could receive by choosing exclusivity over a multiplatform release," commented analyst Jesse Divnich.
Divnich goes on to say that since he doesn't know how much it cost Activision to produce Prototype for both PS3 and Xbox 360, it's hard to say which game has a better return on investment. Nevertheless, it seems pretty clear to us that inFamous could sell many, many more copies if not held back by the more limited PS3 installed base. Sucker Punch's Brian Fleming told IndustryGamers, however, that he's quite happy with the exclusive nature of his studio's games on Sony platforms.
1 Comments
July 14, 2009
We sold 50k more copies of our game on PS3 then you did.
Yes, and we sold 900k more copies of our game on everything else.
It was a stupid move of Sony, or was it Sucker Punch? to issue such PR in the first place.