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Street Fighter V just sold a crazy 600K in 3 Months, why isn't Capcom talking about this?

Jawmuncher

Jawmuncher

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Oct 25, 2017
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3100623-trailer_sfv_juriintro_20160726.jpg


In the most recent Capcom Platinum Update (Found Here) SFV had an impressive 3 months. Amassing an additional 600K units. Which is pretty unheard of for a game this late in its life with no new SKU to boost it. However, Capcom makes no mention of this success in its recent Q&A (Despite commenting on MH:W's 700K or praising 300K for RE7). This has me wondering, what exactly happened to SFV that the game received such a large bump?

Looking back, this is the data we have on hand past launch.
  • From 1 July 2018 to 30 Sep 2018 : 2.1M to 2.2M (100K)
  • From 1 Oct 2018 to 31 Dec 2018 : 2.2M to 2.9M (700K)
  • From 1 Jan 2019 to 31 March 2019 : 2.9M to 3.1M (200K)
  • From 1 April 2019 to 30 June 2019 : 3.1M to 3.7M (600K)
That's a lot of copies of SFV and everything here seems in order (The 700K in Oct 2018 to Dec 2018 was likely later additions of SFV: Arcade Edition and it's BF Sales).

However the 600K Jump from April of this year to June 2019 doesn't seem to have any clear indicator of what caused such a massive uptick. While it isn't uncommon for titles to become more succesful later in life (Rainbow Six Siege is a great example of that). This sort of jump is astounding to see, especially when Capcom doesn't even bring it up in their reports (Which seems to be an on-going trends looking back (June 2019, March 2019, Dec 2018, Sept 2018).

Currently my predictions are
  • Sales were held back (Similarly to the 700K increase)
  • Capcom is counting Free Play Days or X amount of DLC bought as a Unit Sale (Absolutely Doubtful)
  • 600K is maybe a purchase order for the game hitting PS+ or some other service like Humble Bundle (They've never counted titles in this manner before)
  • The PlayStation Hits Version pushed up SKUs (Possible, but that's a lot for a bargain Branding, RE7 is part of the same lineup and only saw 200K)
  • The game is selling well in a region not typically tracked
  • The game really is just finally hitting its stride (AE was on sale for $15 during those 3 months and the vanilla is now currently on sale for $8)
You can see how all of these potential points seem odd, but it has to be one or the other (Or perhaps some weird combination of a few of them). However, if it's the last point (Which isn't impossible) why isn't Capcom making a bigger deal out of these sale milestones? We see numerous posts about Monster Hunter World every 1 million it passes and just for a comparison, 3.7 Million puts SFV only 300K Units behind Tekken 7's 4 million. SFV on two platforms has managed to just about catchup to a fighter selling on 3. I only bring this up since Namco gives the community updates on these milestones.

I'm just at a loss as to why Capcom doesn't promote these sales as I feel they would be a good way to turn talk around on the title. I've done my part and have bought 2 copies my self (1 on each platform). My only guess is Capcom doesn't care about whatever pre-conceived notions are out there and is letting the community and content rollout do the talking for them.
 
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SFV selling 3.7 millions after more than three years on the market is not a milestone worth celebrating. It's a big decline from SFIV and proof of the failure of the model they used this time.

Tekken 7 released more than a year later, the comparison doesn't stand in favour of SFV.
 

rawhide

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Oct 28, 2017
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Passing Assassin said:
SFV selling 3.7 millions after more than three years on the market is not a milestone worth celebrating. It's a big decline from SFIV and proof of the failure of the model they used this time.
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That's not the question posed by the OP--he's specifically asking why they didn't elaborate on how their "dead" game manage to sell a relatively huge amount with no obvious explanation. Focus, Kyle.
 

rude

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Oct 25, 2017
12,812
Capcom does not care about this game's sales. They just sit back and let the dedicated whales they have buy their 700 costume packs/CPT bundles/monthly new costume releases.

The game is quietly profitable.
 
SinCityAssassin

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You would think they'd talk about this considering allegedly it's inexplicably selling almost as well as MHW's pace.
 

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rawhide said:
That's not the question posed by the OP--he's specifically asking why they didn't elaborate on how their "dead" game manage to sell a relatively huge amount with no obvious explanation. Focus, Kyle.
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I was answering to the last part of the post specifically. Read the whole thing.

As for the reason of the sudden larger number of sales, I'd say that going on playstation hits combined with the numerous bargain bin sales is why. But it's nothing significant enough to be promoted by Capcom, because the results of this game are still largely disappointing seeing where it comes from. Unlike MHW.
 
Dreams-Visions

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Oct 25, 2017
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Really speaks to the power and value of post-launch DLC and support.

If you care about your game and keep it fresh and visible, people will come and buy.

Shit man, I just bought 3 seasons of DLC and I haven't played the game since launch month. Just because I think I *might* play it.
 
artemis

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Passing Assassin said:
SFV selling 3.7 millions after more than three years on the market is not a milestone worth celebrating. It's a big decline from SFIV and proof of the failure of the model they used this time.

Tekken 7 released more than a year later, the comparison doesn't stand in favour of SFV.
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By that logic neither Harada or Namco should celebrate Tekken 7's success.
 
Virtua Sanus

Virtua Sanus

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Nov 24, 2017
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Is it possible that they track unique users from used copies that are buying in-game content?

This year's been pretty rough for a few reasons for the game, but I am feeling pretty good about the future of it again now with the most recent update. Hope we get two more seasons at least.
 
CaviarMeths

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Oct 25, 2017
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Yeah Street Fighter V, a game that has struggled over the past few years, suddenly selling more in a quarter than their two big new AAA games (RE2 and DMC5) is uh... interesting... I would like to know more.
 
Zombegoast

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Oct 30, 2017
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A lot of free trials and sales lately.

But it doesn't reflect the daily player count which remains stagnant.
 
Neoxon

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I'm also not sure what caused this turnaround, but hopefully Capcom capitalizes on it. I'm assuming that we'll get our Winter 2019 Pack in November & a more traditional Season 5 revealed in December, but hopefully SFV can end its run on a high note.
 
OG_Thrills

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Zombegoast said:
A lot of free trials and sales lately.

But it doesn't reflect the daily player count which remains stagnant.
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Have you got a link to this?

I'm asking because regardless of my rank, matches in SFV come thick and fast today as they did at launch. In fact, if I don't turn off ranked matches during practice I never get a chance to practice. The SFV community might be small in comparison to COD but they are none the less dedicated.
 

rude

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Oct 25, 2017
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OG_Thrills said:
Have you got a link to this?

I'm asking because regardless of my rank, matches in SFV come thick and fast today as they did at launch. In fact, if I don't turn off ranked matches during practice I never get a chance to practice. The SFV community might be small in comparison to COD but they are none the less dedicated.
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It hovers between 800-1000 daily on PC. PS4 is probably slightly more than that.

Matchmaking is this game is great for me, but I think it depends a lot on where you live.
 
Braaier

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Oct 29, 2017
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I wonder if it's due to the low average selling price. It can't be selling for more than $20 or $25 on average
 
Kaguya

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Maybe they found the missing patch of sales Ono talked about when he said the game is approaching 2.5m sold when their updated Capcom Platinum number was still under 2m! :O
 
Richter1887

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Oct 27, 2017
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Wow.

Good to see it doing well. The game is an awesome shape now and deserves all the sales it got.
 
OG_Thrills

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rude said:
It hovers between 800-1000 on PC. PS4 is probably slightly more than that.

Matchmaking is this game is great for me, but I think it depends a lot on where you live.
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I play on PS4. EU region. And there has never been a let up, the matches still come as thick and as fast as they did with the first beta pre launch.
 
jett

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Ono fudging figures to avoid getting fired, no doubt!

Who knows how they reached these numbers honestly. Might be doing some weird shit to account for season passes or DLC, or maybe they just weren't counting their sales numbers right before lol. Or maybe simply the game being dirt cheap helped this much.

Passing Assassin said:
SFV selling 3.7 millions after more than three years on the market is not a milestone worth celebrating. It's a big decline from SFIV and proof of the failure of the model they used this time.

Tekken 7 released more than a year later, the comparison doesn't stand in favour of SFV.
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SFV has many more avenues of making money than SF4, who knows how profitable it is, but the fact is Capcom keeps making premium costumes for the thing so they must be working. But I also agree it's not really something to celebrate. They didn't say anything when SFV broke three million either. As far as hard units sold I have to assume the game is a disappointment for both Capcom and Sony (since they bought the console exclusivity rights). But its relative failure speaks nothing about the game's "model", more like the game's shit-state of a launch. After SFV basically every major fighting game has adopted the same model of having continued free updates while supporting themselves with DLC. Are they are all failures?

Tekken however was released on an additional platform. If SFV was available on XB1 it most likely would've sold more than T7 at this point.
 
TheDarkKnight

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Oct 25, 2017
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Primethius said:
How much has SFIV sold total?
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http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/finance/million.html

Feb 2009 Vanilla Sf4 - 3.4
Apr 2010 Super Street fighter 4 - 1.9
Jun 2011 Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition - 1.1
Aug 2014 Ultra Street Fighter 4 - 1.3



3ds version
Feb 2011 Super Street fighter 3d - 1.3


Now keep in mind with this model where any game mechanic updates or balance updates and/or characters was a new game purchase. There's going to be a decent amount of people rebuying the game over and over again. But for sure vanilla sf4 launched stronger since super came out around a year later which would make that version essentially dead
 
Moara

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Zombegoast said:
A lot of free trials and sales lately.

But it doesn't reflect the daily player count which remains stagnant.
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Uh

steamstatszojln.png


That is very healthy for a fighting game on PC, especially one that is almost 4 years old now. PS4 most likely has much more than that (and the game supports crossplay so the playerbase isn't split like every other fighting game)

DBFZ in comparison is only a year old and doesn't even have half these numbers despite obviously selling a lot more.
 
D.Lo

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Discount prices hit so hard and so fast these days the only really fair comparison would be total revenue. So many games sell most of their copies at less than half price or much lower than that.

Then again the MTX stuff milks the whales, so you also kind of need revenue, average price paid per customer and total title sales to get a full picture.
 

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artemis said:
Still less than previous entries.
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The market and consumer trends have changed considerably since the T3/5 days. For a fighting game to sell as many copies as T7 did in the here and now is a HUGE success. Its still-growing year-over-year number of tournament entrants is an incredible achievement too. SFV can't quite measure up to that. Not saying that makes it a failure, but it also doesn't make it a success of a huge magnitude that Capcom would necessarily want to brag about.
 
Neoxon

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Passing Assassin said:
SFV selling 3.7 millions after more than three years on the market is not a milestone worth celebrating. It's a big decline from SFIV and proof of the failure of the model they used this time.
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Fight Money aside, pretty much every other fighting game has adopted the seasonal DLC structure, so I find it hard to call SFV's DLC model a failure. Plus we don't know how much profit they're making from said DLC (which is probably a decent bit considering that they're still churning out alternate costumes at the rate that they are).
 
test_account

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Passing Assassin said:
I was answering to the last part of the post specifically. Read the whole thing.

As for the reason of the sudden larger number of sales, I'd say that going on playstation hits combined with the numerous bargain bin sales is why. But it's nothing significant enough to be promoted by Capcom, because the results of this game are still largely disappointing seeing where it comes from. Unlike MHW.
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Are there still many SFV copies in bargain bins? The game launched over 3 years ago. Theres also the Arcade Edition released in 2017. How much did SFV (and SFV:AE) ship?
 
Sandfox

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Moara said:
Uh

steamstatszojln.png


That is very healthy for a fighting game on PC, especially one that is almost 4 years old now. PS4 most likely has much more than that (and the game supports crossplay so the playerbase isn't split like every other fighting game)

DBFZ in comparison is only a year old and doesn't even have half these numbers despite obviously selling a lot more.
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Evo and the game currently being on sale for $8 caused a spike, so we don't know how long that will last.
 
SinCityAssassin

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jett said:
Ono fudging figures to avoid getting fired, no doubt!

Who knows how they reached these numbers honestly. Might be doing some weird shit to account for season passes or DLC, or maybe they just weren't counting their sales numbers right before lol. Or maybe simply the game being dirt cheap helped this much.



SFV has many more avenues of making money than SF4, who knows how profitable it is, but the fact is Capcom keeps making premium costumes for the thing so they must be working. But I also agree it's not really something to celebrate. They didn't say anything when SFV broke three million either. As far as hard units sold I have to assume the game is a disappointment for both Capcom and Sony (since they bought the console exclusivity rights). But its relative failure speaks nothing about the game's "model", more like the game's shit-state of a launch. After SFV basically every major fighting game has adopted the same model of having continued free updates while supporting themselves with DLC. Are they are all failures?

Tekken however was released on an additional platform. If SFV was available on XB1 it most likely would've sold more than T7 at this point.
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Well, failure is a big word. I don't think the game is not profitable for instance because the budget for the game can't have been that big with the state it was in at launch. Capcom would have definitely dropped the game right away if it was bleeding money, milking fans with costumes is a money making venture that helps the game staying relevant from a revenue perspective no matter the actual sales units.

We don't know how much is it making and if it's more or less than SFIV, but the fact that SFIV sold much more and also had a ton of stuff to purchase on the side makes me confident that it was making more money, if only because it reached more people. And of course I agree that if SFV actually released on Xbox One it'd have sold more, but I don't consider that an excuse because it's entirely Capcom's fault to have released the game only on two platforms.

That said I disagree that many fighting games took inspiration from SFV's model. SFV's unique selling point was that you didn't need to purchase any DLC to have all the characters thanks to fight money, and it's still today what caused its demise and why it's the only one still doing this. It resulted of that mechanic that the game launched light on content while being very grind focused. It also made them unable to soft reboot the game with expansions like SFIV. As far as I know, no successful FG released since SFV adopting a similar model.
 
MechaX

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Moara said:
Uh

steamstatszojln.png


That is very healthy for a fighting game on PC, especially one that is almost 4 years old now. PS4 most likely has much more than that (and the game supports crossplay so the playerbase isn't split like every other fighting game)

DBFZ in comparison is only a year old and doesn't even have half these numbers despite obviously selling a lot more.
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Click to shrink...

Not only are we post-EVO where many fighting games get a bump, SFV literally just dropped three new characters while DBFZ hasn't even dropped the one new character yet. That picture is entirely misleading because the average player count when things aren't going on (like no new characters or events) is usually still a bit behind Tekken 7, and only slightly above DBFZ.
 
Neoxon

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Passing Assassin said:
Well, failure is a big word. I don't think the game is not profitable for instance because the budget for the game can't have been that big with the state it was in at launch. Capcom would have definitely dropped the game right away if it was bleeding money, milking fans with costumes is a money making venture that helps the game staying relevant from a revenue perspective no matter the actual sales units.

We don't know how much is it making and if it's more or less than SFIV, but the fact that SFIV sold much more and also had a ton of stuff to purchase on the side makes me confident that it was making more money, if only because it reached more people. And of course I agree that if SFV actually released on Xbox One it'd have sold more, but I don't consider that an excuse because it's entirely Capcom's fault to have released the game only on two platforms.

That said I disagree that many fighting games took inspiration from SFV's model. SFV's unique selling point was that you didn't need to purchase any DLC to have all the characters thanks to fight money, and it's still today what caused its demise and why it's the only one still doing this. It resulted of that mechanic that the game launched light on content while being very grind focused. It also made them unable to soft reboot the game with expansions like SFIV. As far as I know, no successful FG released since SFV adopting a similar model.
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I think what he meant is that most other fighting games have adopted the seasonal DLC structure of SFV & moved away from SFIV's "release a new DLC expansion or an entirely new release for what's essentially an updated version of the same game" structure. With that said, Capcom gets more per alternate costume in SFV due to the price tag being higher.
 
SinCityAssassin

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Moara said:
Uh

steamstatszojln.png


That is very healthy for a fighting game on PC, especially one that is almost 4 years old now. PS4 most likely has much more than that (and the game supports crossplay so the playerbase isn't split like every other fighting game)

DBFZ in comparison is only a year old and doesn't even have half these numbers despite obviously selling a lot more.
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Click to shrink...
SFV is free trial on steam right now with the season 3 content.
 
test_account

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SinCItyAssassin said:
3.7 million as of end of June. Heavily discounted in most storefronts.
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Thanks, although i guess i should have been more specific. How much did it ship to begin with, and how much did it ship in the upcoming years/quarters? I just find it strange if many stores still has this game in their bargain bin for clearance, and this being a noticeable reason for the last quarter increase.
 
Kaguya

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Passing Assassin said:
SFV selling 3.7 millions after more than three years on the market is not a milestone worth celebrating. It's a big decline from SFIV and proof of the failure of the model they used this time.

Tekken 7 released more than a year later, the comparison doesn't stand in favour of SFV.
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SFV sold more than vanilla SFIV, and the return Capcom get from a single $30 season pass(of which they sold 3 so far, + a $15 one) is more than they did get from any of SFIV's updates($40 retail/$15 digital). And that's not counting other DLCs which the game has tones of. At this point, anyone thinking SFV didn't bring in more money than SFIV on console/PC must be trying really hard to convince themselves it didn't.
 
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