Games Industry, who publish the UK charts online, has revealed today that Starlink: Battle for Atlas, which launched last week via Ubisoft on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, has now fallen out of the UK top forty video games this week. This will unsurprisingly come as a blow to Ubisoft. You can view the best-sellers this week here.
Meanwhile, last week's new games all take a tumble downt he UK charts. Poor Starlink falls all the way out of the Top 40 in its second week https://t.co/xnqvfQsMUe pic.twitter.com/vnYfTOO99r
— GamesIndustry (@GIBiz) October 29, 2018
Ouch…
As much as I love Star Fox, he sadly is pretty niche himself. This game wasn’t going to go very far if Ubisoft was banking on this game doing gangbusters on Nintendo Switch with the Star Fox team alone. They probably thought this game would do very well on Switch much how Mario+Rabbids did. That game only did so well because of Mario. Star Fox isn’t Mario, sadly.
Consider that most sells are from the Switch version but I agree with the fact that Ubisoft tho that this game will receive the same attention as Mario+Rabbids but then you have to think that Starlink is more focused on their story while Mario+Rabbids has a story inside the Mario world.
In the end I’m happy that Ubisoft put SF in the game.
There’s also the issue that while Mario+Rabbids was a very good game, Starlink isn’t quite as high quality (from what I’ve heard). Also, I think Mario+Rabbids had a higher Nintendo fan appeal than Starlink.
No standard physical version without toy probably cost some sales here. A contributing factor for me to not buy was the price tag for physical version. Don’t want to buy digital since I am unsure I want to keep the game long term. And also don’t want the toys.
A shame. I actually really like the game.
I paid waaay too much for it to get the physical version (exclusively to get the model Arwing, as a StarFox fan), plus all the digital dlc. The dock to use the toys real-time never came out of the box (and likely never will), but I played it through to end Credits and Maxed out Fox McCloud and the Arwing in game. 30 hours of solid, fun gameplay.
If the deluxe digital version ever goes on sale for 50% off, I recommend it as a genuinely good play … but it’s overpriced as is, and the physical toys aspect was ALWAYS a terrible idea.
At least I got a Cool Arwing toy out of it.
That’s a shame. Hopefully it performs better in the States and over Christmas. As a parent, this is definitely the kind of thing I wouldn’t buy until Christmas. It looks like a fun game with the best use of toys to life that I’ve seen so far.
Meh i think the game is great, ubi did a great job… Starfox in it rox!
Well it’s a stupid game made for stupid people sold by a stupid company.
I’ll save my money for real games made with passion, like Pokemon Go Eevee and the poke ball.
So enjoy your toy plane and I guess your cardboard, because only those type of people who buys cardboard would buy and Ubisoft game with star fox skin 😂
The game is fun and I’ve enjoyed it so far but the toys to life concept is just a cash grab. It’s a shame the full content is locked behind the toys. I would never have bought it if not for starfox but it was definitely not worth the $80 dollars for the physical version. I didn’t know the digital version was a better deal until it was too late.
I think there IS something interesting and cool with the way they’ve done these toys to life. Every other example has just been a little figure that brings in a character. These are actually manipulated and changed during play to affect the game, which is kind of cool. Plus they’re nice little spaceships with guns you can change out. It just seems like its the first time we’ve seen toys to life be actually played with like toys during the game, and they’re toys I could see my kid self playing with, with or without the game. My oldest is a bit too young for this one still, but I’ll be all over it in clearance.
If Star Fox wasn’t in it, I’d be more inclined to wait on this, and see how much others liked it, or possibly pass on it before giving it a chance. Tho I love my Switch and try to get as many games as I can for it. Currently, I have over 40 retail games, and about 30 digital games. Tho I’m only counting the NES “app” as 1 digital game, and not all 24 current NES games as individual digital games. Otherwise I’d say I have over 50 digital games. Which, you can look at it as ‘about 30’ or ‘over 50’ at your discretion. But considering how many more digital games I’ll end up buying, I’ll count the NES ‘app’ as 1 game and not 24+ games. Either way, there are multiple Switch games (both retail and digital) that I’m behind on buying.
That said, Star Fox was the biggest contributing factor to why I bought Starlink. That, and I wanted the Arwing ship as well. I have it on ‘display’ on the controller attachment that it came with, on my shelf with my other Switch games and Amiibo. The fact that Star Fox is only in the Switch version (for obvious reasons) and not in the PS4/XB1 versions probably contributed to people not buying the PS4/XB1 versions. Especially since I read last week that “82% of Starlink sales were on the Switch”. Seems a lot of people only wanted Star Fox in this. And from the looks at the sales dropping out of the Top 40, it seems everybody (well, most people, that is) who wanted it already picked it up in the first week. Also, the price tag for the Starter Kit, and the idea of buying a bunch of other ships or weapons probably turned people off too. That’s a lot to invest into a game that people aren’t fully sure about yet, or perhaps for those who just wanted the Arwing and don’t care about the rest of the toys.
In the end tho, I like the game, myself. I’ve shown it off to a few people, and they all loved it and said they were waiting on it (and some haven’t even heard of it yet), but now that they’ve seen it in action and tried it out for themselves, they want to run out and get it for themselves now. A few weren’t sure how the toys worked. Those who hadn’t heard of this game before were shocked at the idea of the toy and swapping weapons, etc, and how they interacted with the game, was really cool and sold them on the idea of getting it. Others didn’t care about the toys at all and just liked the game for what it was.
Hopefully some people are just waiting for Christmas, and the sales will pick up soon. Either way, I think adding Star Fox to this game definitely helped the Switch version sales, and probably hurt the PS4/XB1 versions sales. Maybe if they did a Soul Calibur type of thing, and added different characters for the PS4 and XB1 versions, that might of helped. Not sure. But as it stands, I’m ok with just Star Fox. It makes sense and works. Other characters for the PS4 and/or XB1 might of been ‘too much’. Still, hopefully sales for this will get better. Might get more Nintendo characters in Ubisoft games that may turn out to be great, if this does better. We’ll see.
I wonder if the game would have sold better overall if there were not Nintendo Exclusive content?
I mean … if a multi platform game comes out and I know the version I’m getting costs the same but is lacking content and is inherantly inferior, I wouldn’t bother buying it either.
The other versions should have had console exclusive ships and missions as well.
Ubi shot themselves in the foot by making one version undeniably superior to the others.
No real content after you play for an hour and realize the entire game is just as boring, hell Star Fox is the only reason this game sold at all tbh, even after Ubisoft ruined the Switch version by being a bunch of cheap asses and skimping on the larger cartridges to save money while giving switch owners half assed physical releases. The sales even prove my point given how the Switch version outsold the ps4 and xbox1 version combined, also no one is falling for that toys to life BS again, toys to life is one of the worst and greediest ideas to ever plague gaming, above that is microtransactions.
Toys to life isn’t bad as long as it’s not the ONLY way to get the content the toys give in the game. Otherwise, if it’s the only way to get content, I’d say it’s WORSE than micro-transactions as you have to buy a physical object to get the content. Least most micro-transactions are digital only. Still, they both suck.
They put all their eggs in the Star Fox cameo basket. I didn’t buy this game because as much as I love Star Fox, that’s the only interesting thing that I ever heard about this game. They basically tried to sell it as a Star Fox game, even though they’re only version exclusive cameos.
I don’t think this is a big deal to Ubisoft. Many people who get this game will buy in hard, $100+, I did. Also these stats often don’t include digital sales which might be higher than normal since it’s the more economical way to play this game. Also, there was a big price difference between US and UK prices so many people may have imported or in the UK just been turned off which means it may have done better in Japan and the US.
Finally, they designed this as a kids game. Kids games are purchased for Christmas. This game could easily get get better sales in November and December than it did in October.