Doom Dark Age is an industry harbinger

The recent Doom release is struggling to pass much futher than a million in sales while it's Gamepass companion, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has now reached 3.3 million.

There are some important takeaways here. 1: They are both Gamepass games. Low sales aren't a Gamepass problem. 2: They are both multiplat releases so it isn't a lack of PlayStation 5 support. 3: They are both new gen-only releases so it isn't a question of install base. 

The biggest difference is that Clair Obscur is a new IP while Doom is perhaps the most ubiquitous IP in the industry. "Does it run Doom" has gone from benchmark to joke to meme to tired at this point. Clair Obscur is just that, foreign and obscur. 

The thing that marketing forgets about IP is that old IP has created an expectation. Word of mouth becomes incredibly ineffective when people have a preconceived notion of what the product is. "Oh, it's Doom again" can be said with excitement or disdain and often is. If the customer didn't like Doom before, they won't like Doom now. If the customer was a little disappointed with Doom: Eternal, they are a lot less likely to buy into Dark Age.

Not to mention that the grim dark of Doom has been replaced by it's arguable source material. Why play Doom when you can play Warhammer 40K?

Clair Obsur, on the other hand, doesn't have any preconceptions or source competition. Square Enix isn't making the big, epic turn-based Final Fantasy anymore. Sega just keeps reskinning Persona. Miss Final Fantasy, but Persona doesn't do it? Just need something different? Word of mouth says it's great. There aren't any recent games to bias players against that word of mouth. 

Would the outcome have been different if Dark Age wasn't Doom? What if it had been a Hexen title and Machine Games had to make new mechanics? There are serious questions about why Dark Age was a Doom title. The answer is most likely that Machine Games can't make anything outside of the Doom/Wolfenstein formula. They don't have the talent and can't find the talent.

Doom and Clair Obscur show two paths, but we know the shareholders can't take the Clair Obscur path. They aren't just risk averse, they are talent averse. They no longer want to invest in people, but only want to invest in returns. They dont want wins, they just want ticket sales.

Shareholder-driven video games are looking a lot like the 0-16 Detroit Lions before they went 0-16. It is a losing formula, and it will start to impact ticket sales.

With the extended crash eating away at hardware sales, AAA (and AAAA) sales, and closing indie studios, it is likely that the best survival strategy will be AA. 4 year caps, 70 million caps, and other limits will be the new measure of competence. Grand Theft Auto 6 may be the last game to come out of the bloated shareholder space. After it fails to produce, there is no doubt that 2K, EA, Ubisoft, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo will be scrambling to maintain some amount of investor confidence.