Heavy Rain has crossed the two million mark. Quantic Dream founder David Cage shared the figure on stage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, giving the PS3 exclusive thriller another milestone a little over a year after it launched.
Cage revealed the number during his session on building emotion into the game, and according to Game Informer’s report from the panel he told the audience the game has now sold more than two million units. He seemed almost surprised by it himself, joking that the game was “a commercial success, which is new to me.” Other coverage of the talk, including VGChartz’s writeup of the session, described the total as close to two million, so the safest reading is that the game is sitting right around that line.
Heavy Rain Keeps Climbing Past Earlier Milestones
Either way, the momentum is impressive for a slow, story driven adventure about a father hunting for his missing son. Sony announced that Heavy Rain had passed one million copies in April of last year, roughly two months after release, and by last August reported sales had reached 1.5 million, with Cage saying the game had sold about four times what Sony expected in the United States. Two million puts it firmly among the more successful new properties of this console generation.
The more striking statistic from the talk may be how many people actually finish it. Cage said 72 percent of players who start Heavy Rain reach the ending, which he compared with an average of roughly 20 percent for games in general. He credited the story for keeping people hooked, and he also claimed that players tend to hold on to their copies instead of trading them in, although he did not offer numbers to back that up.
Cage Tells Developers Game Mechanics Are Evil
The rest of the session was classic Cage. A slide declared that game mechanics are evil, and he argued that traditional systems built around levels, bosses and a handful of buttons that each do one thing limit what games can say. His alternative is the kind of contextual interface Heavy Rain uses, where the same inputs can perform very different actions depending on the scene. He also urged developers to make more games aimed at adults rather than teenagers, and when he was asked whether Heavy Rain even counts as a video game, his answer was essentially that he does not care.
He did not dodge the criticism the game has taken, either. Cage defended its quieter opening scenes, such as brushing teeth and pouring orange juice, saying players needed to settle into Ethan Mars’s ordinary life for the later drama to hit hard. Pascal Langdale, the actor who plays Ethan, even joined him on stage.
For Sony, the result is a welcome validation of its bet on Quantic Dream, the Paris studio previously known for Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Fahrenheit, released as Indigo Prophecy in North America. Cage has not said what the team is working on next, but a commercial hit of this size should give him plenty of freedom to keep pushing his ideas.