Sappharad wrote:I'm guessing that more than half of those were from the Twitter promotion where they gave the game away for free. I bought it on PS3, but I have the PC version because of getting it free. One of my co-workers who hates the series for some reason also took advantage of the promotion to get a free copy.
No way of knowing right now, unfortunately. The SteamSpy sales data only charts back to May 2016, and I'm unable to find anything further back than that. There was understandably a big player spike in Feb, but it's hard to divine sales data from that.
I don't really expect over half of those owner figures to have come from the free promotion, but even if 1 million of those ownerships came from giving it away free, SEGA have still made $1.6 million in revenue at the least on the PC version,
with Valve's cut already calculated, and a $3.99 sale price point (so I'm low-balling the number pretty considerably).
Even having a quick peek at the iOS version's sales data (although I've got no idea about the margin of error), it seems to have made $31,000 in the last 30 days.
It's hard to know exactly why the SEGA Heritage Collection attempts were killed off so early, but it's important to note they released in the same year SEGA had it's huge panic about doubling down on core franchises like Sonic, Total War, Aliens, Football Manager, etc, because of a big loss coming their way in that year's financials.
The shrinking of the business was announced about half a year before the Heritage Collection games released, and it may be possible that the initiative was killed off irregardless of any sales data because SEGA were desperate to climb out of the Red at that point, and anything that wasn't in their core profitability plan was considered a risk and halted.
