Upon its release earlier in the year, Heavy Rain quickly became popular amongst PlayStation 3 owners. Clever adaptation of quick time events (as limited by the hardware itself), a wide variety of deviations in character development, and an engaging story (though, in some respects, it may be flawed) are just a few examples of why many people find Heavy Rain so intriguing.
In fact, players are so captivated by Heavy Rain that it has sold an impressive 1.5 million units–and is predicted to surpass 2 million by the end of this year.
But every success story comes with a troublesome past. Before the game officially shipped in February, David Cage of Quantic Dream was worried that the game he had directed and written would be perceived negatively by consumers. In a talk during GDC Europe, Cage said,
“Heavy Rain is a commercial success, which is something that nobody at Sony or Heavy Rain expected, to be honest with you.”
The CEO also praised Sony for giving Heavy Rain a chance, as he continued to say,
“Publishers in general don’t have balls. That’s a fact. They want a safe bet. They look at what was successful last year, and ask you to do the same. You need to give them reasons to trust you… With a game like Heavy Rain, it comes together very late. If I showed you the alpha of HR, you’d probably kill it and say that it would never happen. Many publishers would have killed that game at that stage. Sony didn’t.”
As it turns out, Sony made the correct decision in allowing Heavy Rain development to continue–1.5 million unit sales is nothing to scoff at.
Heavy Rain was a great game and I’m glad that Sony stuck with it. I just hope that with the success of Heavy rain that maybe we will see more story driven games, that developers and publishers alike will try something different rather than churning out sequel after sequel.
This is what more publishers need to do. Let the brains at the Dev companies run with their ideas. Sometimes you gamble and it pays off big, I get that most don’t want to gamble these days, but I think it would breath new life into the game market if more people took chances these days.
This is a fantastic title, all PS3 owners should give this a try.
Publishers that have no balls… CoD Every year.