Arriving in late May for the PlayStation 3 via the PSN, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger takes the franchise into the $15 digital download space, rather than the full-priced retail one.
In anticipation of its impending launch, Nicolas Joye, Associate Producer on Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, talked to StickTwiddlers about the inspiration for what prompted the move to a PSN release:
There were two things mainly that inspired our changes; the first one would be the change of the market. Triple A retail games are fewer and fewer, the ones that are successful, plus the digital market is getting bigger and bigger. At Ubisoft we think it’s really interesting to try to develop and try to get bigger and bigger on digital markets. We know that in the future the market is going to go that way anyway, so we try transport them as fast as we can.
Also the other thing, we wanted to try stuff with this franchise. As you said, we tried a lot of stuff before (with) the last one [Call of Juarez: The Cartel], which was a pretty big failure and the one before that [Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood] was a really nice success and everybody loved. We like to try things; it is much easier to try new stuff on digital content than on retail, for the scope and investment you’ll have on it. Also because the public that buys a digital game is not always exactly the same and especially isn’t in the same set of mind of what the produce is going to be. There a little more open to not indie but what they expect it will be. It’s not as codified as retail games.
Though Nicholas isn’t “the one who’d make that decision” when it comes to whether or not the future of Call of Juarez is digital, he did say that “I think that anything that [is] a success, technically would have something after it. Saying it would go back to retail, I would not be sure that would be the case, especially if it worked on digital. That’s what we’d stick with probably.”
Do you plan on picking up Call of Juarez: Gunslinger next month? Do you think Gunslinger will be successful? Let us know in the comments below.
