Before you continue reading, let me make this clear: the following article is not a hatchet job on the quality of Shadows of the Damned. The game is a mixture of colorful Japanese design decisions and a bizarre plot that are fast disappearing from retail shelves. No, this is a reaction to the revelation that, between the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Shadows of the Damned, it sold roughly 24,000 copies at retail during its debut month.
Shadows of the Damned never quite had “multi-million copy seller” written all over it but there were reasons to believe that it would do okay for itself. It had some great creative talent behind it, including No More Heroes creator Goichi Suda, Resident Evil developer Shinji Mikami and Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka. Not only that, it was being published by one of the largest global publishers in the world in Electronic Arts.
I looked closely at Shadows of the Damned and picked out 10 elements that may have doomed it to sales obscurity. Nothing buried the game on its own, but I believe these reasons had a cumulative negative effect on the retail performance of Shadows of the Damned.
10. The generic name
This might sound trivial, but a contributing factor in creating buzz around a title is, well, its title. Now, Shadows of the Damned isn't a bad title but it's unremarkable, and Ryan Davis at Giant Bomb commented that the name just kept slipping from his mind. It's not a title that grabs you, even in a quirky Japanese sense like Devil May Cry or No More Heroes. Not only does the title not stand out amongst the plethora of other game titles out there, but it also tells you little to nothing about the game itself. The title Killer7 was about a game with a man with multiple personalities (seven, in fact) and were all highly individual killers. Reading “Shadows of the Damned” says nothing about a game where a Mexican demon slayer has to go to hell to save his killed girlfriend with his phallic skull gun.
9. Box art
Again, this might seem like a minor point, but any marketer will tell you that the way a game looks on the shelf is in-store marketing and not to be discounted. The game's box art is not terrible – it's Garcia pointing Johnson as a gun at some unseen target in the distance on the background of a faded tattoo. The problem with the design is that it doesn't really stand out among the multitude of “dude with a gun” images adorning box art nowadays, nor does it really do justice to the wacky atmosphere of the game. I think a good example of what could have been done can be seen in the art of Catherine from Atlus (which preserves the box art from Japan); the images (there are separate versions for the PS3 and Xbox 360) are much more provocative, showing main-character Vincent crawling up a giant image of either Katherine or Catherine in a harried fashion while wearing nothing but boxers -- it immediately suggests the game's plot about relationships and control, but it's also eye-catching and reinforces its “indie” nature. Considering all the implied and not-so-implied penis metaphors in Shadows of the Damned, maybe something slyly referencing that would have been called for; heck, Duke Nukem Forever's box art gets pretty gun-phallic and is one of the least offensive things about that game.
8. Summer release limbo
Generally speaking, there are three seasons for game releases – there's the lead up to the holidays when all the biggest titles of year come out and try and make a big splash; increasingly there's a second season during the early part of the year where many big games that didn't want to compete head on with the Call of Dutys and Halos of the world release; and then there's the summer, which has always been a lull time for video games as far back as I can remember. It's post E3, when all of the games that avoided the previous holiday season have already come out and a lot of people are looking towards the big releases for the coming holiday season. Kids are out of school and college students are away from their dorm rooms, and that doesn't help in building hype for a game. Whether people would rather spend their time outside in the sun or not, it's just not the best time for a game release and Shadows of the Damned came out right at the start of this lull. Competition with other games may have hurt it as well...
7. Releasing in and around other “indie” retail games
Gamers have only so much money they can spend on games – this is true even for those consumers who have a stack of shrink-wrapped games they haven't opened (you know who you are). It's especially hard for more “indie” titles since people are probably going to be more cautious around them than something established. In the case of Shadows of the Damned, it released a week after Alice: Madness Returns and Child of Eden. While these three games are pretty different in their narrative, structure, gameplay and especially in their aesthetics, what they aren't is a brown colored military-themed FPS title. Simply put, they're all going after a similar sort of game audience and they may have had to choose between one of these games, and that doesn't help when Shadows of the Damned is stepping onto the stage for the first time...
6. New IP
While many core gamers wonder why we keep on getting the same sort of shooter titles seemingly all the time, the answer is simple – those games sell. Most game consumers are more interested in purchasing something they know rather than trying something they're unfamiliar with. It's not surprising, since this is the same behavior people have with most every other thing in life: people are usually going to default to the safe and familiar rather than take a risk. Just take a look at Duke Nukem Forever, a game pretty much sold for its nostalgia value with a venerable if underused IP and it worked in a way. Shadows of the Damned is like this grindhouse-style action title mixed with the occult and featuring lots of quirkiness and sophomoric jokes and it seemed to lack the promotional flogging to get it over the top with consumers...
5. Lack of much promotional grit
It can be hard to compare advertising campaigns of different games, because oftentimes they have different budgets and their marketing teams have diverse goals and target audiences in mind. For my experience, however, I saw some banner ads of Child of Eden around the web and specifically on YouTube, while Alice: Madness Returns got some special treatment on Amazon and benefited from a loyal fanbase from the first game that released a decade ago (and not to mention some trailers that really did a good job of highlighting the game's screwed up nature). By contrast, with the exception of some stuff on MCV, I have difficultly remembering much of any ad push for Shadows of the Damned at all. From its debut at Tokyo Game Show 2010 to its release in late June 2011, it felt like there was a dearth of information about the game. There was a bit more of a push in the month in a half leading up to its release in the form of more trailers and dev diaries, but I still don't feel like they gave a solid enough impression of the game to most people, other than one overriding feeling...
4. Seriously weird
Suda51 is one of the most unique visionaries in the video gaming industry. The game he first became known for in the U.S. was Killer7, which fused a unique cel-shaded universe with a nigh-incomprehensible plot that polarized a lot of gamers – some love it for its unique style while others hate it for its weirdly paced and strictly linear gameplay. He also did No More Heroes, which featured a loser otaku who decided to ascend to the top assassin in the United Assassins Association using his beam katana all in the hopes of scoring with a chick. Shadows of the Damned is a little more conventional, since Garcia Hotspur is tracking down his girlfriend – the catch is that she's already been killed and that Garcia uses a transforming skull to create everything from torches to a gun whose metaphor for a penis is not even thinly veiled. The point is that it's a weird game, though not incomprehensibly so, but when coupled with an inadequate ad campaign and a new IP, there's another problem...
3. Lack of education about the game
Related to the above problem with promoting the game, consumers (especially game consumers) like to go into game purchases with eyes wide open. So it's a problem when exposure to a game is limited for most gamers; I don't think a lot of people even knew what Shadows of the Damned was. This odd new IP isn't easy to classify and I feel that not enough was done to educate consumers on what, exactly, it was about. I don't think being a smaller sort of release is any excuse – Catherine didn't have a huge marketing budget but I feel like Atlus has done a far better job educating the consumer over what the game is about and who the main characters are. Shadows of the Damned really could have used a push emphasizing its gameplay similarities to Resident Evil 4, an apt comparison to a successful and loved game that would help people wrap their heads around what Shadows of the Damned is like. Buzz from positive reviews could counteract these factors, but Shadows of the Damned didn't really have that to fall back on...
2. Good reviews, not great reviews
Some gamers think that review scores don't matter, or at least not anymore. Some dedicated fans know exactly what they're getting and when. I'm sure that's true, but for a large portion of game purchase decisions, reviews still matter. When it comes to titles that don't get a huge advertising push, review scores are a key way to create buzz. Despite the almost constant complaints about Metacritic and GameRankings I read online, those are the top aggregate sites for review scores and are still the best place to get an “at a glance” view of how a game is being received critically. For Shadows of the Damned, the Metacritic score is at 78 percent and GameRankings shows 79 percent. That's not terrible, but it's also not exemplary either; not cracking an 80 percent average and falling far short of the almost revered 90 percent mark means many players weren't going to spend $59 on it...
1. $59 price point
I've railed on pricing before and it's exactly because of games like Shadows of the Damned that I posted my previous op-ed. Now, I don't think $59 is a completely unreasonable amount to pay for a game; it just has to be the right game – economics 101 says that if people are willing to pay the price, then it's not too much. Indeed, the Call of Duty series managed to sell millions at this price point – the absolute premium of the tip-top AAA titles, like from the Gears of War, Assassin's Creed, and Uncharted franchises are deserving of that price point when they launch because people will buy them by the millions. Shadows of the Damned is not any of the above franchises and I'll bet a lot of people looked at the price point and immediately said no. More precisely, a lot said to themselves “Maybe later when the price drops.” Is it really so unfeasible to release it at $10 or $20 less than the “default” asking price? It might help build some buzz for the game before the price drops through the floor in order to make inventory space. You're going to have to believe me that I wrote this article before Shadows of the Damned director Massimo Guarini commented on the price, but it shows that even he agrees with me!
