Bad press can carry your game a long way down the road to penitence. In this case, Gearbox Software and Sega will be begging gamers for forgiveness for quite some time after this whole Xeno-Gate ordeal. To put this into perspective, all the lying, cheating and stealing paid off in a bad way, as Aliens: Colonial Marines had a sales dropoff rate of 84%.
Martin Gaston from Gamespot laid out the figures for the public to see, noting that Crysis 3 and Metal Gear: Revengeance were the top two games of the previous week over in the UK.
Aliens: Colonial Marines and Dead Space 3 both got off to a great start, however following all the controversy surrounding the game, the inevitable word-of-mouth has spread enough to start affecting sales in the PAL territories.
The first-person, xenomorph-shooter also reportedly lost close to 65% of its playerbase in under a week, and this all comes amid continuous reports from gaming media who is actually doing their jobs for once and trying to get to the bottom of the Xeno-Gate conspiracy, which has seen a number of revelations, including Sega's intentions, Gearbox's intentions and TimeGate's intentions.
So far it looks like this situation will never live down its role in destroying the reputation of Gearbox Software as well as the publishing competency of Sega. I'm sure gamers will check twice before putting in any more pre-orders for the next Sega-published title or the next game coming out of Gearbox's development studio.
