Ofp's sales

[lonesoldier 0]

How many copies has flashpoint sold? Is it the most selling game?

Just curious.

[GreyKnight 0]

Simple answer. No. It hasn't sold anywhere near as many copies as it should have done! It was very under-reviewed and rather poorly marketed so it didn't receive the hype it deserved. It's slowly getting more recognition as other war games are released and fail to come close to the winning OFP formula, but it will never be in the same sales league as games such as Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena...

[Albert Schweitzer 10]

It is all about the marketing. Tough luck people safe money in the wrong areas. What would EA games be without marketing. Kind of ashame as having been elected as the "best game of the year" by many magasines and then having a silly turnover. That happens if the managers of Codemaster are former programmers and never worked in the service-industry!  

You already see from the packaging that they never did a SWOT analysis of their game! Why didnt they come to me? I did some good Marketing for 5star hotels (cough cough show off cough cough)

[Ex-RoNiN 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Albert Schweizer @ Aug. 21 2002,20:49)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">You already see from the packaging that they never did a SWOT analysis of their game! Why didnt they come to me? I did some good Marketing for 5star hotels (cough cough show off cough cough)<span id='postcolor'>

You are talking rubbish, what does OFP's packaging have to do with a wrong/non-existent SWOT analysis?

SWOT analysis has nothing to do with product marketing. SWOT analysis concerns itself with the market, not with the eventual product.

Back to school with you

[Espectro (DayZ) 0]

If only Codemasters new how to publish and maketing OFP as Blizzard, EA and other publishers are doing with their games.

You guys ever seen an OFP commercial on TV?

[shadow 6]

I don't think it helps that I've allmost never saw a shocker or poster in any stores during its release either

[Tex -USMC- 0]

Another problem is the classic "Clueless game-store clerk who tells you that Ghost Recon is much better", and of course, having to dig through 20 copies of MOHAA to find 1 or 2 copies of OFP cant be very conducive to high sales.

[Harnu 0]

Ya, there's really a lot more they could have done marketing wise. Here in America, if they just put a few commercials on the air for a little bit it would boost sales a lot. I dunno if there is marketing for it anywhere else in the world, but in the states there isn't!

[Albert Schweitzer 10]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Ex-RoNiN @ Aug. 21 2002,22:16)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Albert Schweizer @ Aug. 21 2002,20:49)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">You already see from the packaging that they never did a SWOT analysis of their game! Why didnt they come to me? I did some good Marketing for 5star hotels (cough cough show off cough cough)<span id='postcolor'>

You are talking rubbish, what does OFP's packaging have to do with a wrong/non-existent SWOT analysis?

SWOT analysis has nothing to do with product marketing. SWOT analysis concerns itself with the market, not with the eventual product.

Back to school with you <span id='postcolor'>

SWOT analysis is a comparing strengths vs Weaknesses and Opportunities vs threats. The packaging itself showed that they actually had no clue of how to promote their competitive advantage. I mean when you looked at the packaging when you bought the game. Did you realy have the right first impression of what you bought there. I just thought: "wow good graphics" but thats about it. Now if you consider this to be only Strength then you missed a lot about OFP. Fine, the packaging can be crap if you have introduced your product into the market with a big publicity boom, but OFP did not! So I guess the packaging is kind of very important. And SWOT has very well to do with the product! In any advertising you can see if a company has really understood what consumer think about it. In other words, know your strenghts, know your weaknesses, know your opportunities and the threats and you know how to sell your product simple as that. And yes, I consider packaging to be a kind of advertising (actually it is merchandising, I know what you think merchandising is but I am right here!   )

[Quicksilver 0]

hell if codemasters can't sell games, lets bust out the big wearable signs and take to the streets of Manhattan. There we would either be mugged, shot, raped, or ran over by a taxi, but atleast we could get the word out. Or we could streak across a soccer field.

-Quicksilver

[GreyKnight 0]

Here in the UK computer games for the PC are never advertised on TV, you only sometimes see an advert for console games. It's correct to say that there wasn't even any in-store advertising for OFP in the UK, I don't remember it being on the charts shelf in Electronics Boutique, GAME, Virgin Megastore, or anywhere! I bought the game after it had been around for a couple of months and was just on the normal game shelves. I bought it because there was nothing else and I felt like getting some kind of FPS wargame. I could have chosen Soldier of Fortune, Delta Force etc, but I happened to choose OFP (after having played Delta Force Landwarrior for the past two months). OFP blew me away, never had I bought a game that was so involving. I've never looked back. In the last year I don't think that a single week has gone by without me firing up OFP, and since Resistance came out I've played it every day for the past two months! Can't get enought....

[Albert Schweitzer 10]

I dont understand why those companies never come up with creative ideas (except the realy big ones). Damn, a demo, a presentation at game-fairs, and promotion through mags is just not enough. I think after a good brainstorm you could very well come up with good ideas about packaging. Especially military games. Why not using some kind of camo-coloured cloth to cover the package and print images on it. Or cover it with some kind of camo-net. As silly and unrealistic this idea sound you have to start with a crazy idea and then see how you can put it into practice. Secondly, I wonder why Codemasters never asked e.g. car-companies to provide them with ingame models, or at least sponsor them for publishing a car in the game. Again a silly idea but it is worth a trie. A good product itself wont sell, examples for that can be seen especially in the software market!

[Ex-RoNiN 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Albert Schweizer @ Aug. 22 2002,00:10)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Ex-RoNiN @ Aug. 21 2002,22:16)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Albert Schweizer @ Aug. 21 2002,20:49)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">You already see from the packaging that they never did a SWOT analysis of their game! Why didnt they come to me? I did some good Marketing for 5star hotels (cough cough show off cough cough)<span id='postcolor'>

You are talking rubbish, what does OFP's packaging have to do with a wrong/non-existent SWOT analysis?

SWOT analysis has nothing to do with product marketing. SWOT analysis concerns itself with the market, not with the eventual product.

Back to school with you <span id='postcolor'>

SWOT analysis is a comparing strengths vs Weaknesses and Opportunities vs threats. The packaging itself showed that they actually had no clue of how to promote their competitive advantage. I mean when you looked at the packaging when you bought the game. Did you realy have the right first impression of what you bought there. I just thought: "wow good graphics" but thats about it. Now if you consider this to be only Strength then you missed a lot about OFP. Fine, the packaging can be crap if you have introduced your product into the market with a big publicity boom, but OFP did not! So I guess the packaging is kind of very important. And SWOT has very well to do with the product! In any advertising you can see if a company has really understood what consumer think about it. In other words, know your strenghts, know your weaknesses, know your opportunities and the threats and you know how to sell your product simple as that. And yes, I consider packaging to be a kind of advertising (actually it is merchandising, I know what you think merchandising is but I am right here!   )<span id='postcolor'>

Well, I'm not an economics major, I'm doing Computing with a few management and economics modules here and there

I always thought of the SWOT analysis as a way of assessing where your company stands in the market and on coming up with a plan to win some market share.

I guess you could apply it to single products etc. too, seems a bit pointless though, much better to simply let the marketing dept. deal with promoting your product. In your SWOT analysis, your marketing dpt. should be under S

[Sparky2002 0]

Well it can't have absolutely bombed or we'd never have got continued support with lots of patches and numerous add-ons, which is always being dependant on strong sales figures. I don't think comparing the sales of well established straight FPS brands and a new squad level solider sim is like with like either.

I remember when OFP came out (in Britain), that bloke pointing his gun seemed to be everywhere, with prominent cardboard displays in the computer games shops and plenty of ads in the gaming press.

[SpaceAlex 0]

Well, OFP was seller number one, but only for a week. But it was on the first place. That's importanat

Codemasters sold over one million copies of Operation Flashpoint.

[Harnu 0]

And about 500,000 of those copies were prolly picked up like how I did.  Just browsed through a store and found one that looked good  

[ralphwiggum 6]

AFAIS, in US, only advertisement that OFP had was some ads on gaming magazine.

i happened to be there when OFP came out. when I picked up the box, I wasn't sure if this was FPS or strategy by looking at the graphics. but graphics were good enough for me.

one thing that CM screwed up is that it let go of targetting some more mature players. we already have mature players here, and i thank god that there are little CS/quake kiddies here. but CM could have put advertisement on magazines like 'Soldier of Fortune' and say that this game captures simulation of battlefield system. unlike most shooting game, OFP seem to fit more mature and experienced players.

[BoonieRat 0]

I read about OFP in a magazine and waited F####N ages for it to come out. I gave up buying magazines a few(feels like ten! years ago though, every game was taking too long to appear, or the amount of good looking games that got dropped or looked bad by the time they got there!. what a wind up!... (marketers look and learn )

[lonesoldier 0]

The only reason i knew about OFP was when i played a demo on a books cover CD, i then waited months for its release and saw it reviewed in a magazine with Gold Award and 94%! So i went and bought it that day. I have not EVER seen one ad anywhere for ofp at all. Ive seen one little add in a magazine. Just in one issue, not printed in the next few issues of the mag.

Also, we cant say that CM sucks with the advertising because i have NEVER seen an ad for any id software games. And there games are Q3A, Q3TA, DOOM series.

[Antichrist 0]

I have no idea what u people are talking about! OFP sold more than one million copies worldwide !!!!

So when u're talking about game selling less than it should've you're wrong, it sold heaps more than that type of game ever should've.

[Denwad 0]

OFP sold alot, in Germany I got the last copy out of five hundred the store had received. Ph34r my EU edition!

[HellToupee 0]

look at the populatity of bf1942, ive tried it dont like it but its ot jip, lets say one day ofp got this jip thing and a few mags compare the games and will most likey like ofp better then every body will know what ofp means, most of the rtcw crowd said huh when i typed ofp on irc when one was yappin about the bf demo.

[suma 8]

I have to say we are very pleased with the recognition OFP was able to get and we are also very pleased with the sales. As we already told in various interviews, we did not believe OFP will be on 1st place of best selling games charts and we did not expect more than 1 million copies will be sold worldwide. We would not dare to dream about this in our wildest dreams. It is very rare that a first game from a unknown studio has such successs (and that is probably why we recieved Rookie Studio of the Year Award on Game Developers Conference this year).

We are aware that not all things Codemasters did were the best possible and we are also aware that not all things we at BIS did were the best possible. Still we do not regret we selected Codemasters as publisher for OFP.