Japan still can buy vouchers, can't they? I suppose after the next financial report we can start getting a decent idea of retail/digital split for higher profile Nintendo games.
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Media Create Sales: Week 30, 2019 (Jul 22 - Jul 28)
- Thread starter Chris1964
- Start date
I think it could do a million, who the fuck knows though. I don't know if Nintendo would even consider a million an amazing success really.
Bowser, a villain, decided that vouchers will be a limited thing in NA...which is kind of weird since it's still available everywhere else.
Hopefully they see how digital games performed with the vouchers and reinstate it.
Not to say AC will do amazingly since it likely won't. Will probably do pretty poorly in Japan like the Bayonetta collection did comparatively
Hopefully they see how digital games performed with the vouchers and reinstate it.
Switch audience is brought in by people that like BOTW and Odyssey, I imagine they're probably more open to action adventure/RPGs than previous Nintendo platforms.
Not to say AC will do amazingly since it likely won't. Will probably do pretty poorly in Japan like the Bayonetta collection did comparatively
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The voucher program began in this past quarter (May specifically) and Nintendo reported their digital sales were up about 65% YOY. Hopefully we can work out some more detailed info about digital split, yeah, but it's clear their digital business overall is currently booming.
Nintendo is greenlighting Platinum games left and right because they are great for the console's image more than sales of the games themselves.
Bayonetta 2 on WiiU sold almost nothing and yet Nintendo went to Platinum to make a sequel, a new IP and a port collection before the Switch was even launched.
Yeah, it's pretty stupid. Are they trying to appease retailers? Gamestop is on the way out, and the other regional Nintendo branches don't mind keeping the vouchers permanent.
Oops, I remember the post, but skimmed over the detail about whether it included VAT or not.
Of course it did better. It was at 1.35m after a few months but on two platforms. And that was apparently disappointing.
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It's still unknown what will happen at 1 October and Nintendo hasn't announced anything so far. If vouchers remain at 9980 despite VAT rise from 8 to 10% things will become even tougher for retailers.
Another point is that the vouchers are also giving you 500Y in eshop credits. Might not be as substantial as the things discussed earlier but it is still worth noting.
Isn't that figure off? 38% was what I remembered seeing?
they shipped that many. most of it ended up in the $20 bins
Sega reported 1.1m shipped weeks before street date even. It was $20 about 5 weeks after launch. There's a reason they canceled Bayo 2, they took a huge bath on the original.
US sellthrough was comparable for B1 and B2 upfront actually, only one was massively overshipped and immediately discounted while the other was conservatively shipped and held price for over a year.
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo wants to keep the vouchers below the psychological 10.000 mark. It will cost them 200 yen per voucher, but that's still nothing compared to the gains they'll make on selling a digital unit instead of a physical unit, and converting a consumer from physical-first to digital-first. I think they'll keep the price as is.
They can always say the extra 200 yen per voucher are marketing expenses :P
LM3 as well
1m by 3/31 isn't an amazing success or way too optimistic.
it needs to hit that to not be a bomb. It's not a wii u game.
Dengeki
July 2019 (July 1st to July 28th)
Top 3 Software:
July 2019 (July 1st to July 28th)
- Hardware: 280 000 units (-12.7%) / 8.5 billion Yen (-8.7%)
- Software: 1 600 000 units (+20.4%) / 10.4 billion Yen (+27.4%)
- Total: 18.9 billion Yen (+27.4%)
Top 3 Software:
- [NSW] Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo): 216 000 units
- [PS4] Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2019 (Konami): 200 000 units
- [NSW] Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Nintendo): 163 000 units
Yeah their release says 38.3%, not 26% (page 4). However that includes all digital sales versus all physical sales, not just digital % of retail games.
What's interesting is that right below that they list "Proportion of Downloadable Versions of Packaged Software Sales" which was 56.4% for the quarter. I'm not exactly sure what that number is referring to. Is it the actual digital split for retail titles (if so that would be big news, so I assume it's not that) or is it something like the percentage of digital sales that are digital versions of retail titles?
EDIT: Actually reading the fine print clearly indicates it's the later- sales from digital versions of retail titles divided by total digital sales (including digital only titles and MTX and such).
I wonder if we could somehow estimate the digital split of retail titles from this info.
38% may be revenue-based and the 26% unit-based or vice-versa I have no idea.
56.4% is pretty much what it says on the tin: the proportion of retail games in digital sales. Basically, over 50% of the money made via the Nintendo eShop comes from retail games, 43.4% being digital-only games, DLC, subs, etc..
And you can't really extrapolate anything from that, sadly.
If AC does <1M, it's a failure. A sub-1M game isn't going to get a sequel when it does those numbers on a successful system.
26% came from the "Portion of 1st party software sales" chart, more specifically the remaining 3rd party portion.
Just a reminder for everyone... these charts are about Nintendo's revenue only and not about any of their systems.
Hmmm, are we sure we can't extrapolate anything meaningful from that? We have:
A) The proportion of digital sales revenue to total game sales revenue (38.3%)
B) The actual yen amount for digital sales revenue (30.6B yen, meaning total video game software sales are 79.89B yen [30.6/0.383])
C) The proportion of digital sales revenue of packaged titles to total digital sales (56.4%, or 17.26B yen)
We can conclude that digital sales of packaged titles (17.26B yen) compared to total video game software sales (79.89B yen) comes out to ~22%.
Also we have that 43.6% of total digital sales revenue comes from outside of digital sales of packaged titles (100-56.4), which comes to 13.34B yen. If we subtract that from the total calculated above (79.89B yen) we can see that their total sales of packaged software (digital and physical) is 66.55B yen.
So, using the yen amount for the digital sales revenue of packaged titles (17.26B) and the total sales of packaged software (66.55B) we can actually see the digital revenue split is 25.9%, which is basically what Dave Gibson said above.
Unless my math is wrong (which is always possible).
I'm a bit confused by these two points, since western DQ XI S and Astral Chain as a whole both seem like pretty niche releases? Does this have to do with current retail/publisher expectations for the games?
Bayonetta 2 fell only a couple hundred thousand copies short of a million on Wii U. It'd be an unpleasant surprise if Astral Chain somehow misses that target on the far more successful Switch.
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One is an extended re release of a title that came out one year earlier on PS4/PC and didn't sell anything remarkable and the other a brand new game.
Dragon Quest games get 3M+ sales from Japan (although DQXI S won't as it's a rerelease). Astral Chain is lucky to get 100k from Japan, so the brunt of sales should come from the West.
DQXI is pretty niche in the West, very much so, in fact. AC could be less niche in the West despite also being niche.
I think Astral Chain lost it shot at being an actual success due to them deciding to focus on the action aspects rather than highlighting the adventure/rpg elements. Still think it'll perform moderately.
Digital Foundry did mention that this game could be confusing to advertise given the multiple parts of it. one part investigative game, one part not-Bayonetta, one part Zelda dungeon crawler.
since the experience isn't consistent (unlike something like Dragon Quest or The witcher), a demo/video would have to be pretty lengthy to give people a solid taste
Yeah I was thinking of how both of them would compare on Nintendo's earnings release for this FY. (since Japan DQ is very popular but won't be counted, and AC likely won't do that great in Japan.)
Chris made a good point though that XI S being a port makes it old news. Curious if a Smash bump will help it in a noticeable way.
I've been saying for a while that giving people a small part of the Treehouse demo might not be such a bad idea. The segment where you get to explore a bit of the hub + 2 missions maybe.
I dunno about that, Automata is PG biggest success and it's more action/RPG with small adventure elements than a pure action game like Bayonetta, Rising and such.
Probably AC art style will turn off a lot of people more than adventure/rpg elements.
Yeah, PlatinumGames pure action games have a hard time breaking out. I would have leaned into this being more of an action RPG like Nier: Automata.
That's what I was trying to get at. AC is somewhere between Automata and Bayo but their marketing has been mostly focusing on the "Bayo-elements".
I would have figured DQXIS > Astral Chain was a safe bet, but I'm bullish on both games.
2D retroish games do disproportionately better on Switch.
Character action games have a weaker record on Nintendo platforms.
Maybe. Unfortunately, I don't think the genre of astral chain has been well communicated. I guarantee you people think it's more like bayonetta than botw.