Then why is DQX not on The PS3/PS4? Or do MMO's sell better on the Wii U? (not really)
I don't think neither Nintendo nor Sony would agree to allow cross-play.
Is it time to give up on the Dragon Quest series in the West?
- Thread starter Mr. RPG
- Start date
I don't think neither Nintendo nor Sony would agree to allow cross-play.
IAmRandom31
Banned
Who crapped on IX in the first place? I've been following the thread but not seeing this.
You guys creating controversy again? lol
You guys creating controversy again? lol
Musou have so far bombed on PS4 just as badly. DQH would probably do just as well being PS3 only in Japan.
Not at all. What does success mean to you? What does it mean to Square Enix? This is what I was trying to explain to you. You keep looking at the install base of the 3DS, and instantly think releasing a game on there makes more sense because obviously it's going to sell more copies. That's what the argument boils down to for you, in terms of arguing why it'd be illogical for them to ignore that platform. Using FFXIII of all games to try and support this line of argument is also very strange. It makes no sense, since it's a different brand, and considering the market in question, this is kind of important.
If a hypothetical Dragon Quest XI was to release on PS3/PS4, it'd be releasing on platforms with a combined install base of around 13 million by the time it launces. That's pretty much a guaranteed multimillion selling entry on the domestic market without me even having to do any real forecasting for it. That's a hypothetical scenario of course.
Here are the more important questions however:
What's the detailed business outlook on the brand in terms of sales potential on a home console?
What are the incentives, and are there any, for focusing the title on home consoles?
What are the details in regards to any potential marketing deals?
What's the outlook of the title beyond the domestic market, and what kind of incentive is included in this?
Is there potential for growth in other markets, and how does this affect the bottom line?
How does this tie in with strategy for expansion into other markets in general?
What are the creative team's opinions on how they want to move forward with the franchise?
Does a move like this affect the future of the franchise in any significant manner?
Your argument keeps coming back to the install bases, which is a weak argument in the face of everything that could go into this kind of decision. You haven't really given this any consideration beyond install bases. They could ignore the handheld platform completely, and it wouldn't be illogical. Maybe you don't like it because you'd rather have it on your platform of choice, or you don't want to buy a different console to play your favourite games, which are are all valid opinions, but they're not opinions that make such a potential move illogical from a business standpoint.
Dragon Quest Heroes isn't happening because Square Enix was smart enough to think to do it. It's happening because someone gave the nudge to Koei, and helped make it happen. It's not like there'll only be one DQH either, or that it's the only franchise that'll necessarily be taken advantage of in this manner, but it's a way to create opportunity there and build more revenue. This is an example of a deal where it's going to be beneficial for all parties involved. That's just a spin-off. Why wouldn't more care and thought be put into a potential business deal involving such a huge brand like Dragon Quest, and an actual mainline title?
I've gone off on a tangent here, and it's beginning to feel weird. I guess my point ultimately comes down to this: if all you can think of is install bases when trying to determine what makes sense, then you're ignoring many different factors that go into these decisions. Try not to be so short-sighed because it tends to a little more complex than that when it comes to determining what's the right move.
Like I stated in the last DQ thread about the West, I don't see SE trying hard to woo Western audiences. It took Enix almost 10 years to retry the DQ franchise in 2001 when DQVII was released, and then took almost another 8 years after 2001 to re-release the DS games. If Enix couldn't be bothered to try hard, than SE is just the same. I would hope that SE consider going thr NISA and Atlus route with this franchise as a LE so they can grow it slowly. Other than that, DQ has no chance of going mainstream anytime soon out West.
Psycho_Mantis
Banned
sörine;151158848 said:
It would be very short sighted to just stick to PS3. The transition from PS3 --> 4 needs to be made at some point and for each company its at a different point. TK are clearly going for a slower approach in comparison to companies like SE, due to greater reliance on the domestic market. Still the PS4 SKU will help in the West where Musou games have a notable audience.
Dragon Quest: Holey Heroes trademark.
Believe (though I've kinda come to terms with it if it doesn't come over.).
Believe (though I've kinda come to terms with it if it doesn't come over.).
FFXIII is the best selling HD console game. That's why it was brought up. It is literally the best selling console game since the PS3 launched ignoring Nintendo first party of course.
13 million assuming that everybody who owns a PS4 never owned a PS3 and the people that owned a PS3 nearly ten years ago still use and haven't moved on to other platforms. Multimillion sellers on consoles aren't common on consoles in Japan, they are practically nonexistent. You are also assuming a very generous attach ratio.
I never denied or ignored any of this, especially the points about other markets which I directly acknowledged. My gripe has always been with the idea that PS4(/PS3) means more sales in the west whilst ignoring the reality that it likely means less sales domestically.
I resent that implication especially from someone who has a close connection to SCE on either a personal or professional level. Especially considering you are the one who brought up install base in the first place.
I've already said it might be simplistic view of the situation but it's a hard sell to suggest that home console software can be as successful as handheld software in Japan. The facts and figures don't back it up and we're talking about a brand whose last entry was on a handheld and also the most successful entry yet.
It's probably Splunker Z (project Z) western title "Splunker: Holey Heroes" or something
terrisus
Member
I'm sure that it would.
But, as was discussed ad nauseam around the time of Dragon Quest IX's platform announcement, that's not the way the series has historically went in the past - trying to "push" install base, as opposed to going where the install base already is.
Well console software is sold for a higer price but it has higer costs associated with production. EDIT: There is also the chance they are going heavy on digital monetisation which is probably more common/welcome on home consoles.
Wada has given "concerns" once at the investor's meeting regarding the relatively lower retail price of handheld software, compared to console ones.
Regardless of what we think, that's how people run SE do.
I cringe every time I see that photo.
The FFXIII point is the equivalent of me bringing up something like Uncharted to try to make some kind of judgment about Gran Turismo in the European market. It doesn't make sense really. Dragon Quest is a bigger brand than Final Fantasy in Japan, so using a very superficial judgment, you'd be setting a multimillion baseline as it is. That's according to the line of thinking you're taking here. Anway, I'm dropping this since it's about to head into territory I'd rather not. It's clear that we disagree since we're coming at this from very different angles, and it doesn't make a difference to me since I already know what's going to happen.
nckillthegrimace
Member
Enlighten us.
Psycho_Mantis
Banned
Still it makes no sense comparing it to DQ when we all know DQ is a significantly stronger IP.
Also while install base is certainly a limiting factor, its something that tends to be less important after a certain magnitude. For instance FF12 sold 2.3 million on an install base nearly twice of the PS3's, yet FF13 did 1.96 million. Additionally, attach ratios can be absurdly high on such release. FF13 sold 1.8 million on a base of 4.5 million, thats a 0.4 ratio. Its not unreasonable to say that a PS3/4 release could do 3 million. One more thing you need to note is that DQ8 was priced 1.5 times higher than DQ9 due to being a console release. Sure dev costs would be significantly higher but like Verendus says there are several other factors in play here, such as incentive to deliver the product in the West, or assistance in promotion and localisation of the product.
At this point, is it really necessary?
Very true. What context was that in?
It's interesting because it was under Wada that they went portable crazy.
As I said though FFXIII is the most successful console game of recent years. We're talking about a depressed console market in Japan and DQIX outdid the console entries at the height of home console popularity. I don't see how you can ignore that home consoles aren't producing the same sales they used to.
flatearthpandas
Member
According to whom?
Chartz? I don't see any sales numbers anywhere else. I do see DQVIII sold 3.1 mill in the first week on the PS2 in Japan and the DS version only did 2.9 million in the first week. HA! CONSOLES ARE BETTER BITCHES
OH SHIT
North America
http://dragon-quest.org/wiki/Worldwide_Dragon_Quest_Sales
some people may have to find a new religion
damnit, even those are from Chartz.
Seriously, does anyone but fucking chartz attempt to track sales? Its ridiculous
Nintendo tracks sales. Dragon Quest sold over 1 million in the West.
Square Enix tracks sales. Here are DQIX numbers in Japan before it released in the West.
Famitsu tracks sales. Here are the Dragon Quest VIII Japan numbers.
Things get a little dicey here. Here is Kotaku reporting on a Square Enix statement that DQIX has surpassed DQVIII worldwide sales at 4.15 million. Naturally, since it is Kotaku, they did not link to a source. They also claim DQVIII at half a million in the West. For all I know, they were using chartz.
Here we have GameSpot reporting 430k copies of DQVIII shipping in NA for over 4 mil world wide in 2006. Numbers correspond with Kotaku's numbers, but again no link. Article is reporting on another SE announcement.
iTunes claims DQVIII at 4.9 million worldwide. Below DQIX ww, but unclear if these are official numbers and whether or not JP mobile sales numbers are included. These don't match up with anything else that I could find and introduce about 800k copies unaccounted for anywhere else. This could imply 1.6 million Western sales or really strong Japanese mobile sales or... anything really.
So yeah. This is obviously not conclusive, but I found no reports of DQVIII shipping or selling 1 million in the West, and we know for a fact that DQIX did. That isn't to say DQVIII didn't, but I can find no evidence of anyone, media or SE, ever reporting it did. At any rate, I don't think there's a serious claim to be made about DQIX harming the franchise in the West, and certainly not worldwide, where there are official reports of IX outselling even the iTunes outlier numbers for VIII.
If anyone knows of any reports or even Kotaku/Gamespot tier articles claiming VIII pulled 1 million in the west, please link them. I failed to find them.
At any rate, I tend to agree with Oregano that PS4 exclusive will cripple Japanese sales and mean absolutely nothing to Western sales, almost assuredly underselling DQIX in every market there is. Perhaps it will set them up for DQXII PS4 exclusive, but more importantly I would hope that Sony is paying them handsomely for it to increased development costs and millions of lost sales.
That said, I would be surprised to see it go that route. If they go PS3/4/Vita, I would imagine they could hit Japanese numbers and still lose sales in the West, but nowhere near as many.
I know it's from a few pages back, but I don't think anybody else responded to it, so I figured I would.
I'm not privy to the inner workings of either version of DQVII, but in a nutshell, "same" game, whether we're talking remake, enhanced port, whatever, doesn't mean that the technology powering both version is the same or even similar underneath; it's regularly the case that it's far from that, in fact. I've only just started getting into game localization as part of my work as a translator myself, so of course take anything what I have to say with a few grains of salt and then some, but even if the original text between two versions of the game is the same in Japanese, the engine behind each version might be entirely different, which has profound implications for how easy a potential "cut and paste" job with an existing localization would be. (Long story short, it's almost never entirely straightforward even in the best circumstances.)
Here's a basic list of things that can change between versions of a game when it comes to text:
- The size of menu and dialog windows (eg: is it fixed or can it change dynamically depending on the amount of text present?)
- Character limits per line of dialog/menu option
- How the text is encoded/encrypted
- How the text is stored in the game's file system
- File names for assets in general
- Font/text rendering routines
Knowing that, one of the big issues when dealing with a "re-release," for lack of a better word, for a game like DQVII on the 3DS is that coding that affects text and other assets related to localization work can drastically change between versions, whether it's because of differences in platform capabilities, the developers updating their engines to run more efficiently, or even because the game was potentially rebuilt either partially or entirely from scratch. Suddenly, even if you still have the localization files for the original version of a given game, they may well be incompatible with the new one simply because that original localization was never designed to function inside the new version and vice versa.
In fact, a plausible nightmare scenario from a localization perspective for a game like DQVII is that the file names and file structure are so radically different that it'd be a fool's errand to expend the time and effort piecing the original localized files in such a way as to get the new version to recognize them. And that's assuming you won't run into any issues with getting the game to render text in a foreign language to begin with, which is still an issue you can encounter with a lot of Japanese games today to varying degrees. (I'm not implying developers who don't account for localizations in the midst of development when they're not guaranteed to happen are bad for neglecting such functionality, mind.) At that point, your "better" option could well be to just relocalize the game from scratch since the technological circumstances may well be different, but then that's a whole other fun game to play when determining whether a return is likely from that sort of specific investment. From what I understand, the original PS1 version of DQVII was an enormous investment on Square's part to get out in English in terms of both money and manpower (seven translators!), so if the 3DS remake is as different from the PS1 version under the hood as I personally suspect, I at least can't say I'd be surprised if they aren't so eager to potentially go through all that again for a remake, rather than a new game altogether.
For a real life example of how different two seemingly similar versions of a game can be, I suggest reading up on Xseed's postmortem of localizing the PC version of Trails in the Sky. Frankly, knowing how much blood, sweat, and tears had to go into making that thing functionally similar to the PSP version, it's a miracle that actually did manage to come out in the end. Huge props to them for pulling through in the end; I don't have experience in something so arduous myself yet, but I can't say I look forward to it either.
Hopefully this sheds a little bit of light on things!
nckillthegrimace
Member
Implications can be waved away if they don't bear fruit.
So they brought it to PS4 for western audience potential. Meanwhile the fastest selling Musou in history on western shores happens to be on Wii U.
If course Sony wouldn't moneyhat a Wii U game so I guess PS4 makes sense.
That's not exactly a fair comparison considering the Zelda license that came along with that "fastest selling" moniker.sörine;151170482 said:So they brought it to PS4 for western audience potential. Meanwhile the fastest selling Musou in history on western shores happens to be on Wii U.
If course Sony wouldn't moneyhat a Wii U game so I guess PS4 makes sense.
Anyway, I feel that the PS4 version is more of a way to increase the domestic fanbase for Final Fantasy XV if anything. I don't even think potential western sales of Dragon Quest Heroes was a significant contributing factor towards making the PS4 version. Still, the fact that it exists slightly helps its chances at being localized.
Psycho_Mantis
Banned
sörine;151170482 said:So they brought it to PS4 for western audience potential. Meanwhile the fastest selling Musou in history on western shores happens to be on Wii U.
If course Sony wouldn't moneyhat a Wii U game so I guess PS4 makes sense.
Due to it being Zelda collab
Evidently WiiU Musou games must of bombed real hard as TK has dropped support.
Due to it being Zelda collab
Evidently WiiU Musou games must of bombed real hard as TK has dropped support.
Not that I disagree with you gus but DQ Heroes won't exactly be selling off the stength of the Musou brand. They made a concerted effort to distance it from Musou even!
IrishNinja
Member
so pretty much nothing then
Again, they bombed about as bad as the PS4 ports have. Koei's seemingly intent on building a market one way though, even if Wii U Musou had outperformed PS4 Musou support would probably still shake down this way. Just like it did for 3DS and Vita.Due to it being Zelda collab
Evidently WiiU Musou games must of bombed real hard as TK has dropped support.
IAmRandom31
Banned
Yeah the the only relevant link there was Nintendo reporting. Nintendo atleast does that, doesn't seem like anyone else is interested. Interestingly enough Chartz has DQIX at 600k in the US and 550k for DQVIII. So if they are as off as they usually are, then DQVIII in the US could of easily did close to 1,000,000 as well. But we will never know, because there is no official report ... I think. Not that I can see anywhere.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
Psycho_Mantis
Banned
sörine;151173089 said:
I'm talking about the West. PS4 is the logical platform to move from PS3, especially with a franchise that has created a fanbase on Playstation systems.
Wow. Amazon UK is asking a lot for this.
Currently playing through VI, which is my third DQ game since I found it for £3. I'm enjoying it. Would be sad if this series disappeared from the West, but I suppose I didn't exactly help by not supporting it on the DS outside of IX.
terrisus
Member
One wonders why someone knew so much about vgcha's "numbers."
JuanLatino
Member
what if Sony is publishing DQ 11 (taking over the development costs, the marketing, and even pay some money for the Ip)
Would the installbase of the 3DS really matter at this point?
Maybe Sony is making a big financial move to secure the biggest RPG Brand in Japan for their consoles. It would mean a massive push and Square could ignore the missing 3DS Sales due to the money they get from Sony
I dont see why Sony should bring the Dragon Quest Franchise back on the Playstation Consoles, only to present a spinn-off.
At their Conference they made it look like some new Partnership, The Comeback of Dragon Quest on Home consoles.
Why all this fuss only for a spinnoff?
Would the installbase of the 3DS really matter at this point?
Maybe Sony is making a big financial move to secure the biggest RPG Brand in Japan for their consoles. It would mean a massive push and Square could ignore the missing 3DS Sales due to the money they get from Sony
I dont see why Sony should bring the Dragon Quest Franchise back on the Playstation Consoles, only to present a spinn-off.
At their Conference they made it look like some new Partnership, The Comeback of Dragon Quest on Home consoles.
Why all this fuss only for a spinnoff?
FF musou confirmed!
Must be that, not big budget, FF spinoff!
In the west the only Musou that sold well in recent years is on Wii U. Thanks to Nintendo.
People should relax with where DQXI is going to end. I think doing on anywhere but 3ds (and i dont even have one) is a really bad decision and i also believe that theres no way in hell they are going to recoup the sales they are going to lose by not doing a 3ds version because of western sales.
But its square enix move and it might work. Who knows. They are trying to get this franchise big outside of Japan for many years now, be it on nintendo or Sony systems, Why not try it again. I have seen dumber moves do quite well, so... Also, DQX is really good, so at least the next one will be awesome too.
I just wished i knew what happened behind the curtains for this one. I really doubt nintendo would've that title go without fighting...
But its square enix move and it might work. Who knows. They are trying to get this franchise big outside of Japan for many years now, be it on nintendo or Sony systems, Why not try it again. I have seen dumber moves do quite well, so... Also, DQX is really good, so at least the next one will be awesome too.
I just wished i knew what happened behind the curtains for this one. I really doubt nintendo would've that title go without fighting...
PHOENIXZERO
Member
DQVII took me a year to finish because I lost interest like half way in, felt like a tedious chore to play through. I think I finished VIII in around a week. SE doesn't care, they'll target the largest platform, that being mobile now for older games, especially in Japan and fuck all the rest.
Psycho_Mantis
Banned
sörine;151202606 said:
Once again you are wrong.
DW7 - 500k
DW8 - 300k
As anyone can see, relative to Japan sales, Western sales are very important and there are only abysmal sales to be found on the WiiU for traditional Musou titles who do not have the name Zelda on them
Interesting. And what were those Wii U sales figures exactly?Once again you are wrong.
DW7 - 500k
DW8 - 300k
As anyone can see, relative to Japan sales, Western sales are very important and there are only abysmal sales to be found on the WiiU for traditional Musou titles who do not have the name Zelda on them