Marvel Vs Capcom: Infinite Digital Sales Tank In September On PS4, Steam

Sony unleashed the top 20 downloads for September over on the PlayStation Blog and Capcom’s Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite only barely cracked the top 20… coming in at an embarrassing 19th. It was almost outsold by the two-year-old Batman: Arkham Knight, which rounded out the top 20 downloads for September.

Event Hubs tries to play it off as if there’s still hope for the game with disc-based sales, saying that the digital downloads on the PS4 don’t “paint the entire picture”, but even Steam Spy seems to indicate that Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite is a poor-selling product, moving only 27,000 units since coming out on September 19th.

For a little bit of perspective, within the span of just a week Studio MDHR’s Cuphead sold 365,674 units between September 29th and October 6th, according to Steam Spy. So time on the market isn’t much of a factor, gamers just think that Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite sucks.

The only stats we don’t have are for the Xbox One, which has historically always had sales tracking lower than the PS4, either by a third or by half. So if Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite sold that poorly on Steam and that poorly on the PlayStation Network during September, expect equally poor sales on the Xbox One.

It is true that we don’t have disc sales yet, and that could have been where some fraction of the sales come from, but even still it’s not looking good for the game, especially since you can only get the PC version on Steam, and it’s being outsold multiple times over by the game-journalists killer, Cuphead.

Most of the commenters noted on both sites that Capcom making their own female characters like Chun-Li ugly and then giving the game a forgettable and uninteresting art-style really dampened the appeal of the game.

Fixing Chun-Li’s face also didn’t do much when other characters like Captain America had no neck, or Dante looked like a barely recovering meth addict who subjected himself to binge watching Jerry Springer while sniffing the farts of a constipated gorilla.

Capcom also removed the 3-vs-3 format for a more casual 2-vs-2 format; they dumbed down the specials so it could attract non-fighting game fans; and they attempted to make it e-sports ready before making it fun-ready.

That’s not to mention that the roster this time around was one of the sorriest imaginable. None of the X-Men made it into the game, a lot of Spider-Man’s villains were missing, plenty of cool Capcom characters were left on the side-lines, and the main heroes they did have left a lot of people ambivalent.

More than anything, trying to make people like Captain Marvel by coercing her into the story mode’s final boss fight to save the day (just before giving the final blow to Mega Man X’s specially made Infinity Buster) didn’t seem to inspire much in the word-of-mouth department to get people picking up a copy of the game. In fact, you could say that making her a prominent part of the story did little at all for any marketable interest in the title.

Marvel has been pushing Captain Marvel quite heavily, but she just isn’t really taking.

The game could have sold gangbusters had they featured old man Logan, especially coming off the super hot blockbuster from earlier in the year. Having a few of the X-Men return would have helped as well, and for crying out loud where was Daredevil?! Including The Punisher would have gone a long ways as well, especially since he’s been the most talked about Marvel character coming to Netflix. I would have purchased a copy of the game just for him.

It appears Capcom may have been caught between Marvel’s marketing department and those mouse-eared lawyers at Disney. Either way, Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite did not get off to a good start on the digital charts. We’ll see how well it fares on the retail side of the charts when the NPD stats are revealed.