With all due respect, I think you know quite a small portion of the 5 mln who bought Halo. If the game was called Ijaki 7 and had the same gameplay, it would have sold between 100k and 200k.
Viva Pinata is a fairly complicated strategy game that was bundled recently with a console. Bundles are sometimes determined not by the desirability of the game itself, but also on things like how much financial or brand-image investment there is in the game itself which the publisher needs to recoup in some way. It's one of the few first-party games for Microsoft this year, I see no reason why their marketing machine should pass on this one.
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With all due respect, I think you know quite a small portion of the 5 mln who bought Halo. If the game was called Ijaki 7 and had the same gameplay, it would have sold between 100k and 200k.
Viva Pinata is a fairly complicated strategy game that was bundled recently with a console. Bundles are sometimes determined not by the desirability of the game itself, but also on things like how much financial or brand-image investment there is in the game itself which the publisher needs to recoup in some way. It's one of the few first-party games for Microsoft this year, I see no reason why their marketing machine should pass on this one.