Editorial: “Failure” is not a word for Blur

I’m once again expressing personal feelings about a topic that piques my interest. Warning, unauthorized opinions ahead.

Some noise has been made of Blur‘s low sales on the NPD reports for May — a mere 31,000 units in the US. I’ve seen sites call it a “failure,” and one even went on to list a whole bunch of reasons why it failed, citing everything from the game’s delay to the wrong platform to not giving gamers what they wanted. For the record, I don’t agree with any of that — the delay helped it immeasurably, the 360 and PS3 multiplayer audiences are loyal, and the game offers plenty for action racing fans like myself.

Critics certainly agreed with that last point. I opened OXM’s August 2010 issue to find a 9 out of 10 rating (“you’ll love every crazed minute”). I opened the August issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine to find 4.5 out of 5 stars (“there’s no way we’re giving the keys back”). Both praised the multiplayer frenzy and thrills as well as the balanced power-ups. Not every reviewer was quite so bullish, of course, but when I see GameRankings and Metacritic offering average scores of 82 from dozens of outlets, I bristle to hear the game called a failure. That’s an aspersion on its quality, despite the fact that the slow start might be more about circumstance.

With that in mind — and as an unabashed fan of this game who has yet to go online and find less than a few hundred people racing on either PS3 and 360 — I’d like to offer some counterpoints that make a hell of a lot more sense to me, and why I think it’s way, way too early to call Blur a failure by any measure. Let me explain.

There are logical reasons as to why Blur made a minor impact in May.

The audience was split three ways. Blur came out a week after Split/Second (May 18) and the same day as ModNation Racers. I’m not sure what your budget looks like, but I can rarely afford to buy three games in eight days — nor do I have the time to play all of them at once anyway. It’s inevitable that three games in the same genre at the same time are going to make people say “Well, I’ll get this one first, and look into the others when I can afford it.” A three-way race was a bad thing, because two of those three games were going to “lose.” And according to NPD, none of those titles hit 100,000 units sold in May, and all three games scored in the low 80s — Metacritic averages all three titles to the same exact 82. So it’s not about quality; it’s about too much choice.

June was dealtastic. Realizing that gamers were strapped for cash in that three-way grab for the racing dollar, Activision issued an official $20 coupon in June to encourage folks to check out Blur once their wallets had refilled. Best Buy and Kmart also put the game on sale in June, and some lucky people were able to stack those deals even though they probably weren’t supposed to. None of those people who came to Blur a few weeks late have been counted yet; that sales data released in July only covers May, and is very outdated. And that leads to my next point…

The NPD data only represents one week in May. Blur shipped May 25th in the US, May 28th in the UK. Since the June data is not yet available (and won’t be for a few more weeks), we are looking at one week of sales and no international data. More importantly, while big sales out of the gate are always preferred, a slow first week no longer means a death sentence. A perfect example: DJ Hero was dubbed a flop on its release too, but what it needed was time for its audience to find it, a price break, and positive word from both friends and reviews to circulate. October and November were soft, but after the holiday, DJ Hero had hit about 800,000 units; today it’s 1.2 million units and counting, all of which come with a turntable controller. That’s not a flop; that’s the long tail at work. So to suggest a game is a failure because it didn’t sell hundreds of thousands of units in its first 168 hours is pretty ridiculous. June’s data will be very interesting to see, and I don’t expect to hear much about any victories it might represent, since it’s a less sexy story than “Blur failed in week one.” Bad news travels fast. For instance…

There were some server burps. I experienced them when I played Blur in the first week or two, though not as frequently as other people — guess I was lucky. But I don’t freak out when I experience launch-window hiccups like that; Blur is not unique in experiencing server issues at the start. Being an online gamer for so many years, I have come to understand that it’s a living ecosystem that evolves and improves with feedback and time. But I saw people throw temper tantrums about the server issues; I saw others take them as a personal insult. Those overreactions probably scared some people away — no data to support that, just my personal hunch. But I also saw that the Bizarre Creations team was working on the problems and fixed them in short order; the game’s received a title update/patch and the issues I’ve seen since are on par with the occasional problems I’ve found in other popular games. Are those server issues embarrassing, particularly after a multiplayer beta? Sure. Inconvenient and frustrating to the player? Definitely. But are they fatal? No — it’s a solvable problem in this modern world, and all you have to do is not scream that the sky is falling because of them.

For what it’s worth, I played Blur a fair amount this weekend, both PS3 and 360, and it was smooth sailing for me. I have never logged on and found less than several hundred players in the lobby, eager to race. Hundreds to thousands of people playing online every day, stable servers, positive reviews…folks, this game is not a failure, and it’s an irresponsible disservice to use that word to describe Blur. All it’s really guilty of is coming in third in a three-way race. And that was just the first lap.

UPDATE: Props and thanks to ArsTechnica for doing a follow-up piece based on this article, noting that DJ Hero had a slow start but some respectable numbers over time.