Actually - according to this weeks famitsu report - mario kart has started selling more than smash in japan. We will see if it continues, but it aligns with the us, where I think this is the first month in which mk8>smash
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NPD September 2019: NBA 2K20 #1, already #1 year-to-date, Borderlands 3 #2, Link's Awakening #4, Gears 5 #7, Code Vein #8
- Thread starter vestan
- Start date
Why would they want to start losing money with the PS4 to keep up in sales with the switch, that is a much cheaper device?
They're selling PS4 just fine at full price and making money with games sales as well
how do we know that ps4 is more expensive to produce than a switch lite?
i guess by now it must be damn cheap and they are just making enormous profit per unit. a price drop won't hurt them, but we won't see one before next year.
now it's black friday and christmas discounts coming up anyway.
I'm not convinced that the reducing your retail presence in advance of the launch of a new generation of hardware is a good idea. Reminds me of how happy retailers were to push the PSP Go (as it in not at all).
I know there is already an inexorable move towards digital, but retail still has some relevance, especially when it comes to shifting hardware.
Oh shit, BotW getting dangerously close to finally falling out of the top 20. Granted that's without digital sales.
It happened in November of last year. It'll happen a couple times this year as well, then it'll reappear for most of 2020.
yep, it always falls down the charts during september-january, as a large chuck of the year's big launches happen during those months. it'll be back to being in the top fifteen by feb 2020.
SMM2 launched in June. Very late June, but still, thats absolutely why it's below FE
SMM2 released in June I believe, so it's not THAT surprising imo. Really happy for Fire Emblem TH though, my GOTY so far.
This chart goes to show how weighted the months are towards September. Link's Awakening charted 4th in September and 5th for the whole quarter.
I would guess the #10 position is in the 300-500k and that #10 through #5 are all relatively close together.
And Fire Emblem released in July so later than Mario Maker 2. In theory MM2 should have sold more since it was longer on the market.
Unless the answer is "much, much more than 15-17 million", probably best not to mess.
Read the tweet, the sales are for Q3 so its July-September only.
Did you think those were the best selling games of 2019 overall? 🤨
I'm sure Sony is trying to do that, but costs probably don't quite line up yet for mass market.
Oh yeah I misread the tweet. I thought it was for the first 9 months. Never mind.
Looking ahead to Nov:
I think Sword/Shield all SKUs combined will take the unit sales record for an exclusive launch month.
Smash Ultimate did ~3.6M retail and some unknown figure for digital (<1.4M though, as NoA confirmed 5M total sales in late Jan 2019).
Pokemon will have a shorter timeframe, but more rabid buying-base and BF week to boost it along with lower entry point with Switch Lite. I think SuMo were somewhere in that 3M ballpark in 2016 anyway.
I think Sword/Shield all SKUs combined will take the unit sales record for an exclusive launch month.
Smash Ultimate did ~3.6M retail and some unknown figure for digital (<1.4M though, as NoA confirmed 5M total sales in late Jan 2019).
Pokemon will have a shorter timeframe, but more rabid buying-base and BF week to boost it along with lower entry point with Switch Lite. I think SuMo were somewhere in that 3M ballpark in 2016 anyway.
Surprisingly good result for Gears 5 considering the ridiculously cheap gamepass promotions Microsoft has had in recent months.
That DQ result is disappointing though. I didn't expect it to blow up the charts but I figured it'd be better than that. I hope the digital sales are better.
That DQ result is disappointing though. I didn't expect it to blow up the charts but I figured it'd be better than that. I hope the digital sales are better.
Sun/Moon did 3.7M in total (retail +digital) in NA (not US) in its first two weeks. While it's possible that Sword/Shield does more than that (I think it'll break 4M in two weeks), but digital will be a larger share of that (due to natural growth and due to vouchers). I don't think it'll beat the retail debut month of Smash as a result.
they already did their howework long time ago. they just prefer profit.
also, why bothering dropping the price just before black friday.
Christ, NBA2K20 was a basketball-themed casino game as far as I could tell and it's still sold like gangbusters.
Lootboxes will never die.
Lootboxes will never die.
Oof, not good for Astral Chain. The fact it released right at the end of August were the main reason sales were disappointing that month, but I felt that it would have a solid showing in September given it's critical acclaim and the fact it had a whole 30 days to work with. And it did even worse over 30 days that in did in just the last two of August. Not even cracking the top 5 on Switch is not good at all, and its compounded by the fact Nintendo did very little marketing for the game. If I were Platinum, I would be rethinking my relationship with Nintendo, maybe work with Square-Enix full-time once Bayonetta 3 comes out.
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Minecraft is still going strong. Lol and Gears 5? Nice. I bet most weren't even expecting it to chart. Congrats to TC and MS. Like many I honestly expected GP to take over completely but I guess many Xbox/Gears fans still prefer retail hard copies. Well done.
Please stop spreading this terrible opinion. There was no way Astral Chain was going to make a Top 10 Quarterly chart when 3 of the spots are annual sports games, the behemoth release that was BL3, and multi-platform all stars like Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V. Link's Awakening, Fire Emblem, and Super Mario Maker are top tier franchises for Nintendo.
But Platinum themselves said astral chain was a success.
so you're gonna believe the word of the developer over an era poster? smh
There's was nothing disappointing about Astral Chain's sales. The fact it charted in it's first month with just a few days of tracking was impressive enough. To expect it to somehow do better in a month like this with all these new releases is just fantasy.
Why would platinumgames rethink their relationship, or care about the marketing? Nintendo hired them to make a game. It's Nintendo's game!
You could have skipped the dubious analysis and gotten straight to your point, you know ;)
Astral Chain did well in August. Second month sales are never big for this genre, so no surprise that it didn't hit top 20. But it's obviously not Nier Automata level of sales, of course: I believe that games did like 172k or 192k first month in the US, which is on a different level.
Nintendo has funded many projects of theirs, despite sales not being strong. That could be worth a lot I think for a contract-based studio like Platinum Games. And it remains to be seen whether they get to do Nier 3, considering Square Enix are not obligated to go with them. But regardless, Astral Chain started development well before Nier Automata launched, so doing Nier instead of Astral Chain was not even an option. We still don't know if Babylon's Fall will work out, so who knows if they are able to always repeat the success. They are talented, so I have faith, but sales have been low or development terminated for everything except Nier Automata, so the question is if they can make a big hit like Nier A without the Nier director.
We'll see, if Babylon's Fall does well, then they seem to match well with Square Enix, and should do more projects. But neither does that mean that their projects with Nintendo are not worthwhile for them (since they have creative goals that Square Enix might not all want to fulfill, while Nintendo might fund different creative projects alongside whatever SE funds).
i'm sure you would, lol
nintendo has worked with nintendo on several projects now, with at least 1 more on the way. their relationship is solid. no need for concern trolling.
That reminds me, with Xenoblade 2 as a model, would it be reasonable to expect to see AC as a million seller in the upcoming Nintendo fy report?
I don't think so, I think it'll be below 1M still. XBC2 did only 1.08M in the month of december, whereas Astral Chain has a weaker sales month and performance is likely a bit lower as well. I think it will hit 1M before the end of the year.
This is sarcasm right?
I swear I read something just like this last month
So you mean I'll have to endure "bomba" posts as it won't show up in the FY report?
Next time they should try to release it fully multiplatform, including PC.
You have single-handedly put me off reading those threads, you know.
They already did that... or is that the joke? I can't tell anymore.
What Dragon Quest needs to suceed in the West is a spin-off
DRAGON QUEST Z
DRAGON DRAGON ROCK THE DRAGON
DRAGON QUEST Z
DRAGON DRAGON ROCK THE DRAGON
NieR: Automata
NieR Producer Yosuke Saito, director Taro Yoko and composer Keiichi Okabe return, teaming up with character designer Akihiko Yoshida and PlatinumGames to present the next entry in the saga – NieR: Automata.
www.metacritic.com
AC had a similar Metacritic score to Nier, was, like Nier at launch, a console exclusive, and came from a developer that has already built up a great pedigree for themselves developing action games.
And yet, as you said, it ended up with a fraction of Nier's sales. Why? This will be something to pay attention to if both Bayo 3 and Babylon's Fall drop in 2020. Since Bayo comes from an established franchise, it should clean up given that it's going up against a new IP - right?
I actually missed the PC release...
(DQIX was so bad that I completely wrote off the series from my future :D)
I hate the way NBA 2K have evolved into a MTX shitshow over the last four-five years, but to be fair there's still a stellar sports sim hidden in there. I've played 300+ hours of 2K20, and not spent a single dime on VC's(ingame currency). They are not that hard to avoid if don't play the MyTeam mode.
Again, I'm not defending the shit 2K/Take-Two are doing with the MTX' and loot boxes, but NBA 2K is not just a b-ball flavored casino.
I'm a bit confused, why is this unlikely? I actually think those numbers are probably pretty close to what Astral Chain sold. Granted, the margin for error is pretty huge, because I could really see anywhere from 135k-210k. But in pretty much every Western chart, hasn't it outsold Nier Automata launch-aligned? I could have sworn at least 2-3 Western countries reported higher sales than Nier Automata, I know in Spain for instance it actually outsold both DMC5 (by about 3k) and Nier Automata (by about 7-8k) (don't know if that includes digital). I would assume that, if anything, that would correlate to the sales in the U.S. It's probably a title that is extremely front-loaded, but, relative to other PlatinumGames titles, did fairly well.
Nier Automata's Western sales aren't amazing because of how quickly the game sold. They're amazing because the game kept selling well over time, i'm pretty sure it's sold about 500k worldwide every 6 months consistently which is absolutely insane (obviously not all of that is from the West but you get my point). Unfortunately Astral Chain probably won't have those legs, but iirc people did a pretty good job at estimating DQ11S's sales in the West at around ~60k in the Media Create thread, and Astral Chain is only one spot lower than DQ11S on the Switch chart. Assuming that it sold 42k-52k, and had a 75% drop (which is pretty normal), that would be about 165k-208k in first month's tracking.
It's rather that Nier Automata is the outperformer out of all the Platinum Games. Why it did so? One reason is the viral marketing 2B managed to garner. Another is the quality helping the viral marketing along. But why that happened is something I cannot quantify.NieR: Automata
NieR Producer Yosuke Saito, director Taro Yoko and composer Keiichi Okabe return, teaming up with character designer Akihiko Yoshida and PlatinumGames to present the next entry in the saga – NieR: Automata.
AC had a similar Metacritic score to Nier, was, like Nier at launch, a console exclusive, and came from a developer that has already built up a great pedigree for themselves developing action games.
And yet, as you said, it ended up with a fraction of Nier's sales. Why? This will be something to pay attention to if both Bayo 3 and Babylon's Fall drop in 2020. Since Bayo comes from an established franchise, it should clean up given that it's going up against a new IP - right?
It was not my point that Nier Automata did well because it was a sequel, and Bayonetta 2 shows that being a sequel does not give these games magic powers despite the critical reception of the previous entry. These games are mostly niche, except for Nier A. It remains to be seen if they can repeat that success with other Square games that are not Nier (that is, with Babylon's Fall), and it remains to be seen if Square Enix goes with them for the Nier sequel.
You're right. It might not be as obvious as I portrayed it. However, there is precedence, with the Japanese debut bring well over what Astral Chain did (182k vs. 30k).
Nier Automata's sales were indeed special due to the legs (although upfront sales in US and Japanese were quite strong as well), which might be in part due to the viral nature of the game.
Why exactly Nier did so massively well is still a bit of a mystery to me, but I think the strong thigh game along with the high quality are important. But in the end, the important thing to take away is that Nier sales are exceptional, and cannot be assumed to be repeated with just any other franchise of theirs. Nor does that in any way mean other projects are not worth it for them.
Bigger processor, more memory that is also more expensive, optical drive, HDD which should be more expensive than the 32GB flash memory of the Switch, power supply unit for more than 150 watts, seperate controller, etc.
I would be surprised if the the small low resolution screen and the battery of the Switch Lite outweigh all this.
Yeah I definitely acknowledge the point I now realize you're trying to make: Automata is simply massive for Platinum and it's going to be hard to replicate. It's much more popular than Astral Chain in Japan, it has better legs, and also I believe (but could be wrong) that Platinum in general has fallen a lot in Japan since the days of MGR and Bayonetta 1, with Automata resembling those days of sales. Falling popularity of series/genres/studios isn't exactly uncommon there.
But all I'm saying is that I think it's very likely Astral Chain's first week sales are similar to Automata's in the U.S., especially with how well it's done compared to Automata in other Western regions initially. By the way, the other place I was thinking of aside from Spain was the U.K., where it sold 36% more copies than Automata at launch (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mc...eckfest-man-of-medan-and-control-to-no-1/amp/). Given this, I could even see a higher launch than Automata in the U.S., though that might not be the case (and Automata might include digital).