Rare “Too Busy” for More Viva Piñata Downloadable Content
By Chris on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 9:39 AM PST In Games, Microsoft, Microsoft
In a new Scribes column on Rare’s official website, a fan asked about future downloadable content for Viva Piñata on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Rare’s response:
“We aren’t doing any downloadable content for Viva Piñata because we are much too busy doing something else…”
In other words, don’t expect any more hats for your piñata, because there isn’t enough of a market to sell them to. This isn’t particularly surprising, as you might remember, back in November Rare aired on the side of caution when discussing Viva Piñata DLC with GamesIndustry.biz:
“We’ve got plenty of ideas for what we can do with downloadable content because Piñata is such a unique game,” said Gregg Mayles, Rare’s lead designer “But the jury is still out.”
“It’s almost pointless doing a huge amount of work at this point because if it’s not going to be successful you may as well put that effort into making a new game”.
It seems like a safe assumption to say the game didn’t sell well enough to warrant development of any further downloadable content. In an interview earlier this year, Shane Kim claimed the game had sold “a few hundred thousand” units through its first few months on retail shelves, while NPD numbers suggested it had sold less than 200,000.
The poor sales can likely be attributed to the fact that the Xbox 360 install base simply is not high enough at this point for a game like Viva Piñata to reach the critical mass it would require to sell well. While it was a critical success, that doesn’t necessarily equal retail success. ‘sup, Psychonauts?
