Final Fantasy XV now ships 6 million units

[Slothy]

Your story was about the second sequel to XIII, not XIII itself. Each mainline entry is always going to get more hype than its potential sequels, so I hardly think that's relevant.

The reason people weren't interested in it had nothing to do with it being a sequel.

First of all I never said XV was a failure. I simply stated that it underperformed compared to its predecessor. Initially that has proven to be the case, but we'll see if the lifetime sales of XV end up higher than XIII's. It does look like they will, however.

Except, again, it's sold almost as many in under three months as XIII did in three years so saying it's underperforming compared to XIII is flat out wrong.

Having said that, I personally feel as though XV has a lot of advantages compared to XIII in terms of sales. First, I don't even remember if XIII was available as a downloadable title. This factor alone counts for over one million of XV's sales.

This assumes that people who prefer to download games never bought them in any other way which is a pretty silly assumption to make. If those million that have bought XV as a digital download were gaming in 2010 and wanted XIII they would have gone to the store and bought it. The lack of digital downloads at the time wouldn't have any impact on a sales performance difference between the two.

Second, word of mouth definitely hurt XIII. A bunch of people got angry and decided to reduce the game to simple phrases such as "corridor simulator" and "linear." A lot of people associated the term "linear" with being "bad" and therefore wrote the game off entirely. Because of this kneejerk reaction, a lot of potential buyers got turned off of the game based on bad things they heard about it. This hurt the lifetime sales of the game, as had people actually given it a chance, they would have possibly found the complaints of players as an overreaction.

I seriously doubt that anyone who actually listened to the negative criticism of FFXIII was likely to buy it in the first place. And there was a lot more to said criticism than it simply being linear. Linear can be fine. FFX was just about as linear for most of the game and it wasn't bad.