Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning has told Eurogamer that be believes EA didn’t do a very good job marketing Stranger’s Wrath.
Speaking with the site at the GameCityNights event in Nottingham, Lanning said the game didn’t sell very well despite its critical reception because f its lack of exposure to the public.
“Stranger was a major achievement,” Lanning said during “I’m thrilled EA did such a crappy job distributing it back in the day. It’s a title that hasn’t been exposed to the world.
“My personal feeling is Stranger was the best game we ever made. It was sabotaged. When you see a big game coming out, just ask what the marketing budget is. If you decide as a publisher not to give it a marketing budget, you decide its fate. As soon as we understood there was no marketing budget, we had zero expectations. We had zero incentive to build another game for them, either.
“Our story is not unique. This is common in the development community. Business decisions are made and the developer’s faucet is turned off as a result. In the case of Stranger, it didn’t perform because it wasn’t exposed and it wasn’t distributed and there wasn’t the number of factors that go to what you need to have success on the shelf today as a boxed product.”
Lanning went on to say that digital units of Abe’s Exodus sold in the “hundreds of thousands,” last year on PSN. Mo marketing or advertising budget for set aside for it, and the high sales were attributed to word-of-mouth only, with people “telling their kids to play it.”
“There’s a whole new generation of people who are picking up on that,” he offered. “I see that’s going to happen with Stranger, too. That’s just a question of us making sure it’s on the right platforms. It’ll get this second wind of life, where it will be easily accessible and not governed by if Wal-Mart decided to stock it or not. Anyone who wants it can log on and get it. If you have a PSN account you’ll be able to get it. That’s a huge game changer.”
Just Add Water is remaking Stranger’s Wrath, which is expected to launch on PSN this summer. An Xbox 360 version is currently being discussed,
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