Mass Effect 2 (PS3) prediction

I’m going to channel my inner Michael Pachter here and make a bold prediction: Mass Effect 2 for the Playstation 3 will fail. It will move some copies, yes, but it’s unclear whether BioWare will even recoup the mild investment of porting ME2’s content onto the ME3 engine and optimizing things for the PS3.

Some of this is based on fact: the sales data I compile for indie news site Huliq includes pre-order data, and the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2 is barely on the radar blip. It is a year-old game by now, and some people (like myself) will pick it up once the price drops to get the “definitive” version because I have yet to spring for any of the DLC on my 360 copy, so we may have a ‘long tail’ situation as far as sales go. Still, I would be surprised to see 500,000 copies move by the time Mass Effect 3 comes out.

My other reason is much more subjective: for all of the “GOTY” praise the game is getting from last year, it’s becoming fashionable to bash the numerous design flaws of the game. BioWare would have won an instant pre-order from me, for example, if they had said “screw it, no-one liked the planet scanning, we’re taking it out”. Or if they’d found a more substantial way to integrate the Firewalker prototype vehicle into the main game. Or, well, more than simply putting the standard “GOTY” edition on a different system than the game released for initially.

Fanboys and girls out there, feel free to prove me wrong here.