Midnight Suns has been confirmed as a sales failure, despite positive reviews, making it the third Marvel game in a row to do poorly.
You’d think that making a Marvel video game would be a literal licence to print money but, strangely, that’s not the case at all. Insomniac’s Spider-Man games have been exactly the sort of mega hits you’d expect but , Guardians Of The Galaxy, and have all significantly underperformed.
Avengers wasn’t very good but the other two were excellent – at least as good as Spider-Man – and yet they’ve sold far less than you’d expect based on both the name and the quality of the games.
It was obvious that strategy game Midnight Suns wasn’t doing very well, as it had just a few weeks after it was released, but now publisher Take-Two has confirmed as much, admitting that ‘it’s possible the release window wasn’t perfect’.
Midnight Suns was released on December 2, which is a little late in the year for a major Christmas title, but not excessively so.
It did always seem optimistic to try and launch a strategy game, even one using the Marvel licence, as a major Christmas title but given 2022’s gift giving season was unusually quiet it wasn’t the stupidest idea ever.
The risk didn’t pay off though and, according to Bloomberg writer Jason Schreier, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told him that the game had been a ‘critical success but a commercial flop’.
There’s still a lot of DLC to release for the game – with the Deadpool character recently being added – and Zelnick hopes that the game may have a ‘long tail’, like other Firaxis games.
That may be true but most sales now will be at considerably less than full price, which will eat into the game’s potential profits.
It’s already looking unlikely that there’ll be any kind of sequel but what this might mean for a new XCOM game is unclear. According to Midnight Suns co-director Jake Solomon on a new entry, so it may be a long while till we find out.
In the meantime, there’s free demos of Midnight Suns on both Xbox and PS Plus Premium, and we strongly recommend you check them out if you can.
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