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Media Create Sales: Week 48, 2011 (Nov 28 - Dec 04)

Under-perform by DQ standards, definitely, just like FFXI did by FF standards in raw numbers on multiple platforms, but if it's a well developed game of its kind and Wii U isn't a flop (in which case they could also put out a PC version if the actual game's worthwhile) it could be well worth the investment Square did. We already know single player DQ is next in order but still, FFXI was probably worth it too since they decided to give that another shot (and failed so hard), I don't imagine they actually expect DQX to suddenly light the charts on fire going through the same transformation... Just hope it's an actually decent MMORPG.

Then why make it? If the market isn't going to respond to it like they would an actual DQ game, it makes no financial sense to do potential harm to the series while bringing-in less revenue. If a business is going to make a financial and time investment in a product they need to make sure that that product is going to be the best option for them. "Yeah, DQ would sell a lot better if it was single-player than mmorpg, but lets go ahead and make the mmo anyway." It ins't going to light the charts ever. I loved DQVIII and was basically a renewed DQ fan after playing it and highly anticipated this game but I will be boycotting it as well - if it even makes it to the states.

That is the general consensus with the Japanese game developers at this time. 3D Mario instead of 2D, Soap-opera Metroid instead of Metroid, DQXmmo instead of DQ, FFXIII instead of FF 1-VII. There is something majorly wrong with these companies. They keep trying to make games the market doesn't want and they know they are doing it - but they don't care. Who is running these businesses?
 
Yes, I know, that's what I also commented on. The ever present "unhealthy" (rather than "toxic") part was a lack of productions, not bombs of what did arrive (which occur more often the closer to its end the system is), especially when discussing brands like DQ and Mario, including their spin offs (swords, battle road victory, whatever else).

As for DQX, I'd say Square has to worry more about its actual development than the platforms, unless Wii U is a monumental disaster (like a hardware take on FFXIV)...
I think Swords did great numbers but that was way back in the insane early days of Wii. Battle Road Victory didn't do nearly as well and hit bomba bins pretty quick to clear out shipments. On the other hand the I•II•III Collection did surprisingly well just over two months back, so who knows?

The 3 year gap between DQ titles on Wii didn't do the franchise any favors I think though. They really should've either been doing spinoffs/remakes consistely this whole time on Wii to seed the market or just dropped the platform entirely and moved DQX to 3DS, this weird half measure we've gotten is definitely a worse route forward. Itadaki Street Wii really seems like something we should've gotten 2-3 years ago, and we should've had stuff like Swords 2, Torneko 4 or DQVIIr by now too.
 
Then why make it? If the market isn't going to respond to it like they would an actual DQ game, it makes no financial sense to do potential harm to the series while bringing-in less revenue. If a business is going to make a financial and time investment in a product they need to make sure that that product is going to be the best option for them. "Yeah, DQ would sell a lot better if it was single-player than mmorpg, but lets go ahead and make the mmo anyway." It ins't going to light the charts ever. I loved DQVIII and was basically a renewed DQ fan after playing it and highly anticipated this game but I will be boycotting it as well - if it even makes it to the states.

That is the general consensus with the Japanese game developers at this time. 3D Mario instead of 2D, Soap-opera Metroid instead of Metroid, DQXmmo instead of DQ, FFXIII instead of FF 1-VII. There is something majorly wrong with these companies. They keep trying to make games the market doesn't want and they know they are doing it - but they don't care. Who is running these businesses?


The idea is to get people hooked onto the game, have them pay to play it for a year or two.
That'll be a huge source of revenue for SE.
 
I think Swords did great numbers but that was way back in the insane early days of Wii. Battle Road Victory didn't do nearly as well and hit bomba bins pretty quick to clear out shipments. On the other hand the I•II•III Collection did surprisingly well just over two months back, so who knows?

The 3 year gap between DQ titles on Wii didn't do the franchise any favors I think though. They really should've either been doing spinoffs/remakes consistely this whole time on Wii to seed the market or just dropped the platform entirely and moved DQX to 3DS, this weird half measure we've gotten is definitely a worse route forward. Itadaki Street Wii really seems like something we should've gotten 2-3 years ago, and we should've had stuff like Swords 2, Torneko 4 or DQVIIr by now too.

swords 2 was a complete no brainer, why that never happened i'll never understand
 
Then why make it? If the market isn't going to respond to it like they would an actual DQ game, it makes no financial sense to do potential harm to the series while bringing-in less revenue. If a business is going to make a financial and time investment in a product they need to make sure that that product is going to be the best option for them. "Yeah, DQ would sell a lot better if it was single-player than mmorpg, but lets go ahead and make the mmo anyway." It ins't going to light the charts ever.?

Success through subscriptions man.
FFXI, from a retail sales perspective, didn't light up the charts. Heck, it was a shaky looking proposition for the first two or three years of operation, but became Square Enix's largest money-making venture to date. Companies have to be willing to take risks for return on investment every once in a while.

FFXIV is still up in the air because the traditional console MMO market is still largely untapped, and they have a slim chance to present 2.0 as a new product. Will it happen? That has yet to be seen, but as a FFXIV player, I appreciate their commitment to the product, and will show this with my dollars.
 

Mpl90

Two copies sold? That's not a bomb guys, stop trolling!!!
Yeah, the reason why Nintendo and Square-Enix didn't even start to think about Dragon Quest Swords 2, as Wii Motion Plus juggernaut along side Resort is something I'm still wondering about.
I mean.

A sequel to a game which sells almost 500k, which does everything to repair the bad things that characterized the first one (the excessive simplicity, the excessive linearity, and other things...), implementing the whole new peripheral which allows very precise SWORD controls and is actually pushed by the console maker a lot...sounds like something so logical to me.

But maybe this Nintendo, the "panic Nintendo", the one which is going to kill it with notable releases on 3DS (in 5 months, we'll have Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart, Kid Icarus, Luigi's Mansion and Animal Crossing, probably ) will think about it the next time, with Wii U.

But the Itadaki Street bad result is really unexpected. Wii has been a real enigma this year: some games doing well / very well, from third parties ( IE: Strikers, Go Vacation, Family Fishing, DQ Collection ), or different from the usual Nintendo offer ( Goldeneye) and the normal first party / almost first party output going with slow sales (Kirby) or low sales (Zelda, Wii Play: Motion, Itadaki Street ). Sounds like a strange kind of audience is still there, I don't know...

Maybe, it's the 3DS which is absorbing the """core""" Wii audience, I don't know...
 

enishi

Member
Yeah, the reason why Nintendo and Square-Enix didn't even start to think about Dragon Quest Swords 2, as Wii Motion Plus juggernaut along side Resort is something I'm still wondering about.
I mean.

A sequel to a game which sells almost 500k, which does everything to repair the bad things that characterized the first one (the excessive simplicity, the excessive linearity, and other things...), implementing the whole new peripheral which allows very precise SWORD controls and is actually pushed by the console maker a lot...sounds like something so logical to me.

But maybe this Nintendo, the "panic Nintendo", the one which is going to kill it with notable releases on 3DS (in 5 months, we'll have Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart, Kid Icarus, Luigi's Mansion and Animal Crossing, probably ) will think about it the next time, with Wii U.

But the Itadaki Street bad result is really unexpected. Wii has been a real enigma this year: some games doing well / very well, from third parties ( IE: Strikers, Go Vacation, Family Fishing, DQ Collection ), or different from the usual Nintendo offer ( Goldeneye) and the normal first party / almost first party output going with slow sales (Kirby) or low sales (Zelda, Wii Play: Motion, Itadaki Street ). Sounds like a strange kind of audience is still there, I don't know...

Maybe, it's the 3DS which is absorbing the """core""" Wii audience, I don't know...

And the best selling first party Wii game this year is Rhythm Tengoku Wii, follows by Just Dance......
 
If you (generally speaking) play a lot with your friends, i think that you can be able to coordinate with your friends which version to get in advance.

That's friction, and friction is deadly to business. Some people play with different groups of people regularly. Some people get started late compared to everyone else. Some people play in large mixed groups -- remember, MH is a game whose biggest market is teenagers, and it took off partially because people can play with everyone at their school, not just necessarily their 2-3 best buddies.

Each time you introduce platform choice here, you concretely lose money. Every person with two groups of friends that break for different platforms, you're looking at someone who might just not bother. When you can't get a monoculture going in large pools like a school, you're no longer dragging in new customers via peer pressure and trend-following because there's no longer a "buy this one thing and you'll be able to play with everyone" option. The factors that drive legs disappear and you split your upfront sales and then drop off the charts, or everyone just picks the preferred entry and standardizes on that and the investment in the second platform is completely wasted.

I mean, I don't know what to tell you here. Your entire theory about how this works is wrong. You want to use online FPSes in the US as an analogy here but the big differences between the two situations make it a really inaccurate analogy. Literally 100% of the appeal of this game is built around the idea that you buy it and play local multiplayer with people, so anything that makes that easier and more fun (rather than complicated and more work) will make the game sell better.

I should be more clear, sorry. I'm only referring to playing with friends online.

Right, and your insistence on drawing that equivalence is what's preventing you from seeing how the two situations are different.

From a purely economic standpoint, the purpose of online play isn't to let you play with friends, it's to let you play with strangers. The goal is to make it possible for your customers to play with others even if their friends don't game, or own the game in question, or have time to play with you on the same schedule. It reduces friction by making MP always available: if you buy a game at launch, you're basically guaranteed to find people to play it with at any hour of the day, without doing any coordination or negotiation to get your friends on board. People can do the work to play with their friends if they want, but the feature has still served its purpose even for people who never once play with someone they know personally.

MH is tapping people into a much smaller pool of potential partners, which means they have to optimize for maximizing people's opportunities to play -- which in turn means making sure everyone can play the game with everyone else.

Then why make it?

FFXI was basically funding Square-Enix's entire operation for like six years. Whether or not they can actually achieve that kind of success again, the reasons they would want to should be pretty obvious.
 

Mpl90

Two copies sold? That's not a bomb guys, stop trolling!!!
What was the drop between Layton 4 to Layton 5? Would a proportional drop be good for IE3 to IEGo?

[NDS] Professor Layton and the Flute of Malevolent Destiny (Level 5) - 301.290 / 659.504 / 45,68% 26/11/09
[3DS] Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracles (Level 5) - 117.589 / 340.477 / 34,54% 26/02/11

But Layton 5 is still counting, and it's far more recent. So, it'll sell more and more with time.
For the difference between IE3 and IEGo...I really don't know. Especially because Go will have great legs due to coming early on a rising platform and the presence of anime and manga...and a movie out the week after its release.
 

duckroll

Member
Layton has very substantially declined, especially after the first trilogy. It's pretty clear that people are seeing the signs of milking, and some of them just don't like it. It's probably the main reason why we haven't seen or heard anything about the "final" Layton game yet. If they release it "on schedule" early next year, it could end up doing something like 200-300k lifetime, and that would pretty much put a nail in the coffin of Layton as the big franchise it once was.

If IE Go is a huge drop, then we'll be looking at the same thing again. It has less to do with platforms and more to do with how Level-5 handled the way the series were presented. Ending a series and then jumping into a "new trilogy" immediately is not the best idea.
 
DQ X is not like other Dragon Quests since its an MMO which adds a bit of complexity,but seeing the state of the Wii, now I see why SQ decided to add a Wii U version.
 
Layton has very substantially declined, especially after the first trilogy. It's pretty clear that people are seeing the signs of milking, and some of them just don't like it. It's probably the main reason why we haven't seen or heard anything about the "final" Layton game yet. If they release it "on schedule" early next year, it could end up doing something like 200-300k lifetime, and that would pretty much put a nail in the coffin of Layton as the big franchise it once was.

If IE Go is a huge drop, then we'll be looking at the same thing again. It has less to do with platforms and more to do with how Level-5 handled the way the series were presented. Ending a series and then jumping into a "new trilogy" immediately is not the best idea.

One thing that surprised me about IE3 was it was very obviously overshipped and yet the third version actually did pretty well, I don't know how that happened, especially when the third version was released so close.


BurntPork
lol yeah, sometimes I forget the username and just quote.
 

duckroll

Member
The problem with how Level-5 has moved forward with their successful franchises is that they seem to believe that the majority of the audience are actually invested in the ongoing storyline and all the character relationships they've developed. This is a very RPG mentality. It's not surprising because Level-5 is first and foremost a (bad) RPG developer.

What is unfortunate for them is that the appeal of their most popular franchises don't seem to be directly related to the story, the writing, or the characters. They just happened to finally make games which were fun, simple, and appealing to a wider audience. By planning each set of games as trilogies, and sequels/prequels which expand the timeline and make it more and more complicated, I fear that they have basically started to raise the barrier of entry for each game so much that it's directly affecting sales now.

Silly Hino.
 

Kyoufu

Member
So much ridiculous in this post.

I can see DQX failing miserably. FFXI was successful because it had global appeal and cutting edge (at the time). DQX has neither of those attributes. It'll fail harder than Rayman Origins in the west and it will cling on to its life in Japan.
 

Chris1964

Sales-Age Genius
1 week away from Vita and we are still in complete darkness for initial shipment. I don't remember what was the last time this happened. I hope we'll get something next week.
 

Alrus

Member
What? After Flopda and Ibomba Street, it's clear that the market is moving on from Wii, while the PS3 market is strong right now.

And Ni No Kuni was a massive bomb though. Just because Tales did really well doesn't mean the PS3 is a better market for the kind of game DQ X is. (maybe it is, I have no idea what SE expects with that game, it's such a weird project for me...)
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
I think Swords did great numbers but that was way back in the insane early days of Wii. Battle Road Victory didn't do nearly as well and hit bomba bins pretty quick to clear out shipments. On the other hand the I•II•III Collection did surprisingly well just over two months back, so who knows?

The 3 year gap between DQ titles on Wii didn't do the franchise any favors I think though. They really should've either been doing spinoffs/remakes consistely this whole time on Wii to seed the market or just dropped the platform entirely and moved DQX to 3DS, this weird half measure we've gotten is definitely a worse route forward. Itadaki Street Wii really seems like something we should've gotten 2-3 years ago, and we should've had stuff like Swords 2, Torneko 4 or DQVIIr by now too.
I'm pretty sure Battle Road Victory approached 250k while it was in numbered MC charts, and lingered in lower numbers for a few more weeks so probably reached 300k... Wasn't it an accessory/card driven (or was it 100% optional fluff?) arcade port though, and still only did what, 100k less than Swords, which wasn't such?
Ridleyscott said:
Then why make it?
Uh, because such things have the potential to be worthwhile to them as the post you quoted kept mentioning? MMORPGs have subscription fees, not just the raw sales numbers, hence FFXI being worthwhile enough to inspire another MMO attempt in XIV... It's not like they abandoned DQ (or FF) single player, IX was such, XI will be such. Nor does mentioning a few flukes like Other M together make for the trends you seem to perceive. 3D Mario is successful, 2D Mario wasn't abandoned, etc.
 

BurntPork

Banned
And Ni No Kuni was a massive bomb though. Just because Tales did really well doesn't mean the PS3 is a better market for the kind of game DQ X is. (maybe it is, I have no idea what SE expects with that game, it's such a weird project for me...)

I don't think the PS3 market itself caused Ni No Selli, though.

Or maybe I just like making up these names.
 

Alrus

Member
I don't think the PS3 market itself caused Ni No Selli, though.

I think that market is half of the reason Ni No Kuni bombed. Level 5 reputation is the other half.

Also people use Kirby as a way to say the Wii market is dead, but it will still probably finish at 500-600k. Rhythm Tengoku sold really well and Just Dance Wii is doing pretty good. I have no idea why Itadaki street bombed that badly...
 
Depending on IS's shipment, NNK might not be so epic.

Level-5 can't even win at failing. Sqaure Enix got them beat, and Gyrozetter will make it worse!
Oh Itadaki's a huge bomb, but it could have a better chance at legs given it's genre and platform. Both games are probably looking at under 120k lifetime though, which is pretty terrible considering the massive mainstream brands involved (Ghibli, Mario, DQ).



I'm pretty sure Battle Road Victory approached 250k while it was in numbered MC charts, and lingered in lower numbers for a few more weeks so probably passed 300k... Wasn't it an accessory/card driven arcade port though, and still only did what, 100k less than Swords, which wasn't such?
Swords did around 500k, BRV did closer to half as well.
 

BurntPork

Banned
I think that market is half of the reason Ni No Kuni bombed. Level 5 reputation is the other half.

Also people use Kirby as a way to say the Wii market is dead, but it will still probably finish at 500-600k. Rhythm Tengoku sold really well and Just Dance Wii is doing pretty good. I have no idea why Itadaki street bombed that badly...

Well, I guess Bombaki Street might have been a fluke.
 

Shiggy

Member
The problem with how Level-5 has moved forward with their successful franchises is that they seem to believe that the majority of the audience are actually invested in the ongoing storyline and all the character relationships they've developed. This is a very RPG mentality. It's not surprising because Level-5 is first and foremost a (bad) RPG developer.

What is unfortunate for them is that the appeal of their most popular franchises don't seem to be directly related to the story, the writing, or the characters. They just happened to finally make games which were fun, simple, and appealing to a wider audience. By planning each set of games as trilogies, and sequels/prequels which expand the timeline and make it more and more complicated, I fear that they have basically started to raise the barrier of entry for each game so much that it's directly affecting sales now.

Silly Hino.
I think the story of the first Layton was still kind of fine and charming, but after that one they went completely crazy...
 

duckroll

Member
I think the story of the first Layton was still kind of fine and charming, but after that one they went completely crazy...

I'm not really commenting about the quality. I'm talking about how consumers react to the way the series is presented. If each game was completely stand alone, and they don't try to build some sort of on-going narrative, I think the series wouldn't see the sort of drop off it has. The problem is that after the third game, they tied everything up and sort of "ended" the series. But suddenly they announce a new trilogy, which is specifically a prequel, and they establish this detailed timeline, and introduce a new ongoing villain, they had an animated movie which "expanded" on the story further, etc. The 4th game even ends with a sort of To Be Continued thing.

Once you do something like that you either pull it off really successfully and the audience ends up consuming all the different forms of media that's connected because they want the "full" story, or you risk the audience being confused or turned off and just deciding to be done with the series because it's too much to follow.
 
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