EA man Glen Schofield, studio manager for Visceral Games, has said they did studies on ”how many unique users there were” over XBL and PSN for Dead Space.
They found around 3 million had played the game, which is about twice the number of copies bought new. The dev team wanted Dead Space a ”bang for the buck,” without online play.
”…we didn’t have online which is one of the big features that you need to have to kind of keep it in the house a little bit longer these days,” conceded Schofield in an official EA podcast.
”But then we also did studies on sort of how many unique users there were on the PSN network and Xbox Live. And realized, you know what, there’s over three million people that have played Dead Space. Maybe we’ve only sold 1.5 million or whatever the number is.”
”…we didn’t look at it and say we have to have online. What we said we’ve got to be bang for the buck. Some people could get through our game in 10 hours or so, so we learned,” added the studio boss. Games need online play now to stay relevant for the long-term, we just have too short an attention span these da… oh look, an unguarded sandwich.
Source: Kotaku