Document Archive: Origin Sales Data (August 11, 2013)

[Bandit LOAF]

This is one of the most fascinating documents we've released: EA's sales data for all Origin SKUs after their first year of stewardship. Some of these numbers may surprise you! Note that this is not lifetime and does not include games sold before the 1992 buy-out.

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Original update published on August 11, 2013

 

[Quarto]

Wow, Armada was far more successful than I would have expected - $2.5 million is a lot, given how small the game's budget would have been. Makes you wonder why they didn't bash out any more Academy/Armada-style games afterwards. Was it because of the pressure to complete WC4 on such a short schedule?

 

[ChrisReid]

Yeah, people sometimes overlook Academy because it was "just a mission simulator," but that's something people were absolutely clamoring for at the time. There was no internet space sim modding community when WC2 came out, and the ability to easily put together custom missions was extremely novel 20 years ago. It's hard to imagine in our 21st Century techno-universe, but just the mission gauntlet was worth the price of admission for me in 1993-4. I played the hell out of that.

 

[Quarto]

Yeah, and multiplayer was even more critical than mission editors. It actually makes me wonder - I do understand why they cut multiplayer from Prophecy, given their time constraints, but... it seems remarkable to me that none of the documents we've had access to thus far even hint at the possibility that somebody considered finishing WCP's multiplayer module after the game's release, and shipping it as an expansion pack or something. It seems like such an obvious thing, it's weird.