Red Steel 2s disappointing sales revealed

Only 270,000 copies of Red Steel 2 were sold world-wide – find out why

Speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference Europe in Germany today it’s been revealed that Red Steel 2 has sold really poorly with just a mere 270,000 copies worldwide. Creative Director at Ubisoft Jason VandenBerghe revealed the information during a talk on Motion Control. VandenBerghe believes that motion control must become standard and multiplatform to make it worthwhile. He believes that developers have struggled with the transition from analogue controls to motion control saying that “Motion control is profoundly different. It’s screwed up the entire industry! The most important feature is the absolute, utter lack of guard rails. This turns the human being holding the controller into the constraint, and this makes a designer’s life a living nightmare.”

The testing of Red Steel 2 was fraught with problems too, and VandenBerghe called the process “Chaos, absolute random chaos” with people getting so disgusted they would just give up and say that Wii Motion Plus doesn’t work at all. The tutorials in game were also improved as people were just resorting to wildly waggling or slashing to get things to work. Red Steel 2’s sword mechanics are very complicated and waggling just isn’t going to cut it.

So why did Red Steel 2 sell poorly? VandenBerghe believes that it was it only being on the Wii and the requirement for MotionPlus. But it wasn’t just that he says that “I isolated this factor called audience willingness. There is a small group of people that is willing to get up and move and exert themselves for fun … We had to ask ourselves: how many gamers are willing to move? I don’t know how many there are, but it’s no higher than 20 per cent. That’s actually probably optimistic.”

Basically, people just don’t want to get off the couch.