In the video game industry, most people would tell you that game sales are the most important thing to have. After all, if your game doesn’t sell well and you don’t make a profit, then you won’t be able to make more games. However, as gaming fans will tell you, sometimes developers and publishers put too high of expectations on titles and then complain when they don’t meet the “high end” of those expectations. An example of this from last year was Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope by Ubisoft. The title was great, but Ubisoft felt its launch was “disappointing.”
What that means is still debatable, as we haven’t gotten solid sales numbers for how the game has done or is doing now. Many people criticized Ubisoft for the statement because of their troubled launch schedule and putting all their hopes on this one game and then blaming it for “failure.”
However, while the CEO of Ubisoft made those statements, the game’s producer, Cristina Nava, had different thoughts. She talked with VGC and said that she knew the game would do well as time marched on:
“The first Mario + Rabbids had more than 10 million players,” Nava noted. “Even though it’s Mario, it’s also a genre game: turn-based tactical adventure. So we cannot expect to sell high numbers at the very beginning, because a game like that is a slow burner. Even if at the beginning it seemed like Sparks of Hope didn’t meet expectations, we are confident that over a number of years it will grow. Because it’s been received, by both the press and the public, very, very well. It’s just a matter of giving it time, with word of mouth etc.”
She’s not wrong about that. Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope was praised by critics and even won awards last year for its quality. Fans enjoyed it, too, and loved how the Ubisoft Milan team expanded what the first game did and made it even more robust.
Plus, while the first game in the line did well at launch, there was a reason for that. It came out during the Switch’s first year, so you only had a certain amount of quality exclusive titles you could play! In contrast, the sequel came out during a busy period of 2022, where you had to choose what games to get.
Many fans hope the game sells well over time so they can get a third game.
