What are you looking forward to?

[Entsuropi]

 :-/

[Spriggan]

And people wonder why I'm not married.

[Spriggan]

Since the other Halo 2 thread is a spoiler I thought I'd post this here, $100 million opening for Halo 2?  looks like it, there were about $78 million in presales alone.

[Mr_Pleasington]

Im not looking on the spoiler thread as I'm not that far into the game yet.

Overall, I think Halo 2 is an improvement on the original.  Especially with the new weapon designs.  Now your standard batte rifle is actually a decent weapon instead of being utterly worthless.  They've really polished it and it shows.

One thing that completely frustrates me is the multiplayer lobby though.  You can't choose a specific gametype you want to play!  It's ridiculous.  So I can't just say I want to play Assault, I can only pick Team GAme.  Super suck!

[Fellfrosch]

I'd heard that Halo 2 was big, but I didn't realize it was 100 Million. I did some quick checking on rottentomatoes, and the only movie of the year to have a bigger opening was Spider-Man 2, with 115 Million (those are weekend numbers, which is different than a single day, but the Halo2 numbers include presales so I'm calling it even).

[Archon]

Pleasington, none of us are very far into the game yet, so the spoilers thread is just sharing parts of the game that we (dis)liked so far. No spoilers for the story, just stuff elements of the game.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

considering that a video game costs 5-10 times as much as a movie ticket, that means that 5-10 more people went to see spidey that weekend then bought Halo 2 this week. any movie that made $200,000 still beats Halo 2, i think,in terms of viewers.

[Prometheus]

Dividing 100 million by 10 still gives 10 million at least. It's not That badly off. Besides, the comparison still isn't fair since many of the copies of Halo 2 are going to households while movies viewed by households get multiple tickets. Even then, it isn't really an accurate way to view things, but it's still probably true that more people enjoyed Spiderman 2 than Halo 2.

It's suddenly amusing that we're comparing two things that are second in a series.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

/me backtracks and re-does his math

it should say 10,000,000. I don't know where that $200,000 came from.

I'm not sure I trust that the number of households that bought Halo 2 that has more than one Halo 2 player living there is that significant.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

oh, and one of you yahoos is giving us a review, right? This isn't something we should skip on for review.

[Fellfrosch]

The important difference is not in number of viewers but in profit. I don't know how much either movie cost to make, but the fact that video games are creeping up into hollywood-size revenue is big news. If it turns out that the video games have a cheaper development cost, thus turning out a much higher profit margin, then we're going to see an increase in big-name investors backing video games in addition to movies.

More money will, presumably, mean better games; but it could also mean stiffer deadlines that don't leave time for full testing, as with World of Warcraft. This is rarely a problem on consoles, however, so it's hard to predict what would happen.

[Spriggan]

Video games allready have huge budgets, Capcom has had several with a $10 million budget and so have other companies, it's not that uncommon anymore.  Heck I wouldn't be surprised of WoW was close to that too.  The high cost of games is one of the reason there are so few that stray away from any norms, its becsaue the investors are too scared of looseing all the money that was invested.  It's also casued lots of Japanese companies (square, sega and a few others) to go bankrupt and get bought out by others that didn't go all out.  Nintendo, and Capcom are about the only 2 Japanese developers that didn't come apart over the past few years due to looseing lots of money through failed games.  Capcom becsaue they had about several big flops, but lots of good games that helped offset the cost, and Nintendo becasue they have a small release scedual and most of their games sell very well.

The high price is also one of the reason so many games feel rushed too, the companies despertly need to get that money back ASAP (like Vivindi) so they end up stabbing themselfs in the foot becsaue then no one buys the game.  Of course this dosen't apply to WoW, since I'm sure I'll be the fastest selling MMO game ever.

Back to Halo 2, it looks like it pulled in 121 million in one day!  That's a lot of cash.  And because we're talking about how much things made.  The Shrek 2 DVD   generated about $185 million over the weekend in combined DVD and VHS sales.  Man, I wish I was a fat annoying Ogre (I've only got the fat and annoying parts), I'd be so rich right now.

[Gemm: Rock & Roll Star; Born to Rock]

Well, you've also got the fact that you're a MMO as well going for ya. So don't get your hopes up yet.

[Fellfrosch]

I don't consider $10 Million a big budget when comparing games to movies.

[Mr_Pleasington]

Well, my clan is up and going really well.  We're up to about 10 members and people keep rolling in.  I just wish more would sign up for our Bungie clan page here:
http://www.bungie.net/fanclub/9635/Group/GroupHome.aspx

I thought the pages would be weak, but they're pretty slick and have their own forum.  I'm impressed.  Just hope the rest of the clan starts signing up for it.