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NPD Sales Results for February 2009

legend166

Member
farnham said:
why didnt wii music sell like 3 million copies..? (worldwide)


Yeah it did, but we're talking about not making Super Mario Galaxy so they can make more Wii Fits, Mario Karts and Wii Sports. Which all sold over 10 million.
 
So Vesperia and DotNW are almost tied, strange.

Wow, NMH did over 200k! Rising Star were very pleased with its sales in Europe, so it must be even higher than that over there! :D

MMV no doubt deserved it!

How did Tree of Tranquility do?
 
Tales of Vesperia - 107k
The Last Remnant 118k
Eternal Sonata - 98k (360)
Blue Dragon - 189k
Infinite Undiscovery - 110k
Lost Odyssey - 348k

It looks like there is just a small but hardcore 150k or so 360 owners in the US who buy all the JRPG's. I'm one of them, I own all of these.

The strong numbers for Lost Odyssey I can understand. It had good advertising, and a broad appeal. Blue Dragon has me scratching my head. It did almost as much as Vesperia and Trusty Bell combined.

It also looks like SO4 will be hard pressed to match it LTD, and that's an arguably more appealing to the West, with good advertising and an existing fanbase.
 

vanguardian1

poor, homeless and tasteless
farnham said:
why didnt wii music sell like 3 million copies..? (worldwide)

Some would say a lack of a peripheral, but I believe it's more of a problem with it's basic design approach that the other Wii franchise games posses, and for the more advanced gamers a song creator would have helped immensely.
 
Hero of Legend said:
So Vesperia and DotNW are almost tied, strange.

Wow, NMH did over 200k! Rising Star were very pleased with its sales in Europe, so it must be even higher than that over there! :D
I highly doubt that.
 
Arpharmd B said:
It looks like there is just a small but hardcore 150k or so 360 owners in the US who buy all the JRPG's. I'm one of them, I own all of these.

The strong numbers for Lost Odyssey I can understand. It had good advertising, and a broad appeal. Blue Dragon has me scratching my head. It did almost as much as Vesperia and Trusty Bell combined.

It also looks like SO4 will be hard pressed to match it LTD, and that's an arguably more appealing to the West, with good advertising and an existing fanbase.

There is one thing that LO and BD had in common, they were both MS games and guaranteed exclusives... perhaps this meant a greater marketing push from MS? LO's art design I think was much more western so yea I agree that one makes sense... BD though just doesn't match up well...

What released around BD? Maybe it was due to the launch window being more open?
 
Tylahedras said:
There is one thing that LO and BD had in common, they were both MS games and guaranteed exclusives... perhaps this meant a greater marketing push from MS? LO's art design I think was much more western so yea I agree that one makes sense... BD though just doesn't match up well...

What released around BD? Maybe it was due to the launch window being more open?

This game called Bioshock.
 
Tylahedras said:
There is one thing that LO and BD had in common, they were both MS games and guaranteed exclusives... perhaps this meant a greater marketing push from MS? LO's art design I think was much more western so yea I agree that one makes sense... BD though just doesn't match up well...

What released around BD? Maybe it was due to the launch window being more open?


BD launched in the states in August of 07. Only things i remember coming out were madden and Bioshock.
 

t3nmilez

Member
The whole Deadly Creatures thing doesn't surprise me. I heard it was good and worth checking out, but the concept doesn't appeal to me at all, and I buy a fair amount of Wii software. It seems to be somewhere between hardcore and casual, with the game looking like a casual game but not playing like it. That's a tough sell to a lot of people. I guess it's a shame that an innovative title like that got killed, but such is the nature of the business I suppose, I'm still saddened about Blast Works.
 
gtj1092 said:
Zack you can't win theres is too many of them. They all agree with each other thus making their majority OPINION somehow factual.


Also where were all of you for the Marvelous laying off employees thread? ;)

Didn't care to discuss sales and unsustainable business models then, I wonder why?
Yeah you just keep telling yourself that.
 

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
BishopLamont said:
Yeah you just keep telling yourself that.

He has a point though, smug as he is being. Marvelous has been nothing but Marvelous on Nintendo systems, yet they are hurting.
 

Parl

Member
HK-47 said:
He has a point though, smug as he is being. Marvelous has been nothing but Marvelous on Nintendo systems, yet they are hurting.
We're in a credit crisis, and smaller companies are less able to cope with that. Marvellous has published a hell of a lot of PSP games too, and as far as I know, only develop the Havest Moon titles out of the ones they publish.

On top of this, they're funding several Wii projects that have yet to be released, along with a PS3 game, and some DS and PSP games.

If Marvellous grew their business to its current state largely on credit, and continued its expansion through the same means, the current credit crisis is going to make them struggle.
 
HK-47 said:
He has a point though, smug as he is being. Marvelous has been nothing but Marvelous on Nintendo systems, yet they are hurting.
Laying off a few employees is a big difference to going bankrupt or posting massive losses when revenues are at an all time high. Everyone's hurting in this economy, some more then others and that depends on how you're doing your business.

Anyway, I was talking about his whining of being outnumbered, not the Marvelous part.
 
HK-47 said:
He has a point though, smug as he is being. Marvelous has been nothing but Marvelous on Nintendo systems, yet they are hurting.
If I had to choose between the hurting of losing 20 people or the hurting of facing bankruptcy, I'd really prefer the former.
 

Shaheed79

dabbled in the jelly
This Zachak character is either very biased and shortsighted or not very bright. He looks at everything Wii related with such a narrow and limited view of things that his overgeneralized arguments end up not holding petroleum.

First he ignores the fact that Wii games are known for having very long legs and tend to make up the bulk of its sales in the months following release. The first month Boom Blox came out it sold what? 40-50k? It was quickly labeled a flop due to GAF's shortsightedness and inexperience. Game ended up doing 450k within the next 3 months. These are the advantages of developing for a console that sells an average of 700k a month in a single territory. He then refuses to even acknowledge the worldwide market for Wii games and thinks 1 month of npd equals lifetime sales and the average return for a Wii game. All of those niche games that made PS2's library so great and diverse did not sell half a million during it's launch month. Those games saw continued sales off the charts which is the benefit of making games on the market leader. Most HD games are front loaded for the same reasons most Gamecube and Xbox games were front loaded.

On top of all this people like him have a hard time admitting that Wii games do indeed cost significantly less than their HD counterparts to produce especially the B to C quality core games that are all too common on the console. Due to this those low to medium budget Wii games don't have to sell nearly as much as their equivalent HD counterparts.

I don't think there has been a single original or ground up 3rd party game made for the Wii with the time, effort, resources and talent put into games like Bioshock, GoW, COD4, L4D, Dead Space, Orange Box, DMC4, Oblivion, Burnout Paradise, Fallout 3, MGS4, GTAIV, RE5, SFIV, Assassins Creed ect. Not even close.

Hell I don't think we've even seen a single 3rd party Wii game the level of games like Army of Two, UT3, Ninja Gaiden 2, VF5, SCIV, Dead Rising (a cheap, low effort port job with horrible reviews doesn't count), Fear 2, Lost Planet, Mirrors Edge, Grid, Pure, Far Cry 2, Battlefield:Bad Company, Dirt, Saints Row, The Darkness, Condemned, Test Drive Unlimited, Prince of Persia, Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, Infinite Undiscovery ect. once again considering effort, resources and talent.

The closest 3rd party Wii games to those B level games I just mentioned are, Red Steel which had the budget but got horrible reviews, No More Heroes which was a great game that could have been AAA had it not been so low budget with a minuscule development team, Umbrella Chronicles which was also not only low budget but was outsourced to a C grade anime game developer and lastly Madworld which has the best pedigree of all Wii's 3rd party games but probably had a budget and development time slightly higher than that of their previous game God Hand. It even uses the same PS2 game engine.

So in conclusion comparing the sales of the HD consoles AAA, A or even most B level 3rd party titles to the small budget, low resource, ported down or horribly reviewed 3rd party efforts released so far on the Wii is not only disingenuous but just plain ridiculous. Only someone trying to make a flimsy and highly refutable argument would do it. In fact it's downright amazing the Wii has as many 3rd party half a million plus sellers as it does given the effort they have put on the console thus far.

It's imperative that publishers understand it's not that the Wii audience want only limited effort to low budget games from 3rd parties but rather that those are their only choices from 3rd parties. This is also the reason why Nintendo has the highest selling core games by far on the Wii. They have been the only publisher putting real effort, resources, talent and money into their Wii games. This really isn't rocket science but Publishers will have a million and one excuses not to put even half of the effort into their Wii projects that they put into their HD games and people like Zachak and War Machine seem to have them all memorized.

"If Madworld doesn't outsell DMC4 then Wii has no audience for AAA games!". "So what if Capcom sold nearly 3 Million copies between RE4 Wii edition and UC! Look at the horrible 1st month sales of that fantastically down ported Chop till ya drop! What more could Capcom have done with that?!"

Johann was absolutely right. Publishers are now far past the point of making slight adjustments to their HD portfolios. Now it's either support the market leader with some or most of their best developers or face the possibility of going bankrupt within the next 2 years. Some developers may very well rather risk bankruptcy than treat the current market leader like the market leader. In that regard there is nothing we can do as gamers but salute them in their admirable yet uncompromising, unyielding and steadfast developer ethics.
 

andthebeatgoeson

Junior Member
legend166 said:
The stupidest thing about this whole argument is the assumption that making games that sell like Wii Sports and Wii Fit is easy and cheap. Even Nintendo showed they can't do it all the time with Wii Music.

Haha, the only saving grace of suffering poor Wii ports will be next-gen's poor Nintendo clones in HD. I will revel in their tears.
 
HK-47 said:
He has a point though, smug as he is being. Marvelous has been nothing but Marvelous on Nintendo systems, yet they are hurting.

Marvelous Entertainment Inc. (株式会社 マーベラスエンターテイメント ,Kabushiki-gaisha Māberasu Entāteimento?) (MMV) is a multinational corporation that produces animation, music, video games, television series.
 

carlnunz

Member
Going by the IGN live blog of the iwata keynote:

75 million selling third party wii games in the US alone

that cant be right, can it?

." Last year in the U.S., according to NPD, more third-party games were sold on Wii than any other platform. So far in the U.S., 75 third-party games for Wii have sold through one million units. "

http://wii.ign.com/articles/965/965783p1.html
 

Htown

STOP SHITTING ON MY MOTHER'S HEADSTONE
carlnunz said:
Going by the IGN live blog of the iwata keynote:

75 million selling third party wii games in the US alone

that cant be right, can it?

." Last year in the U.S., according to NPD, more third-party games were sold on Wii than any other platform. So far in the U.S., 75 third-party games for Wii have sold through one million units. "

http://wii.ign.com/articles/965/965783p1.html
No, that sounds about right.
 

starmud

Member
shykyoichi said:
Marvelous Entertainment Inc. (株式会社 マーベラスエンターテイメント ,Kabushiki-gaisha Māberasu Entāteimento?) (MMV) is a multinational corporation that produces animation, music, video games, television series.

well, it seems like weak software sales and currency in europe had a big effect on them. harvest moon sales ballooned quiet a bit on ds in europe but now they almost cut sales projections by half for their harvest moon games on ds

what would cause such a huge drop off (in a fairly fast time frame) for harvest moon though, i don't know (economy? :3).

still, trying to use marvelous as an argument to say wii development dosent work is weak. in the u.s. the audience for most of their games will pick up the software, given if its on wii or ps3, trying to say a game like rune factory that just shipped on wii here would sell better on a HD system is looney tunes. while you could debate its sales in japan in such a scenario you then would have to account higher dev costs.

much of that would again be moot given most of their game sales apparently come from overseas. for such a small company its a good thing there are viable platforms in the market that don't require huge costs or i don't see how a developer like marvelous would be able to to do business.

trolls of course will just say any type of response like this is just fanboys trying to make things look good for nintendo. yet how you could form this argument based around one small jp company and not feel like your grasping at straws is beyond reason as it is :p
 

donny2112

Member
botticus said:
Still not even close. If anything, it must be worldwide.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is.

Wii third-party > 360 third-party >>> PS3 third-party for total sales in the U.S. for 2008.

75 third-party Wii games have shipped > 1 million worldwide.
 

Spiegel

Member
donny2112 said:
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is.

Wii third-party > 360 third-party >>> PS3 third-party for total sales in the U.S. for 2008.

75 third-party Wii games have shipped > 1 million worldwide.

75 third party million sellers on Wii after 2 years? I seriously doubt that.
 

Jocchan

Ὁ μεμβερος -ου
I doubt that, Donny. There were 21 third party million sellers (worldwide) on the Wii as of last September:
n50ncp.jpg

EDIT: lulz Sadist :p
 

Jocchan

Ὁ μεμβερος -ου
I think he meant DS + Wii third party worldwide million sellers, or at least this is what I got from liveblogs earlier.
 

hemtae

Member
9:47 a.m.: Manufactures of game hardware must help build the hardware installed base so there will be a better chance for all developers to sell their games. "With Wii, we took this responsibility very seriously." That's why so many big franchises all appeared with 18 months and the VC was designed to operate as the same kind of attraction. "We used these tools to build our installed base and because of this we are expanding the ability of everyone to sell software." Last year in the U.S., according to NPD, more third-party games were sold on Wii than any other platform. So far in the U.S., 75 third-party games for Wii have sold through one million units. "Let me offer another example of growing development opportunity." Shows Wii Balance Board, which has sold almost 15 million units around the world.

http://wii.ign.com/articles/965/965783p1.html

He may have misheard Iwata or something
 

dabra

Member
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/090130/02.html

As of the end of March 2008, there were only twelve titles for Wii by third parties whose global unit sales from the launches exceeded one million, and this figure excluded titles from Nintendo and Pokémon Company. However, this number jumped to thirty at the end of December 2008. Likewise, at the end of March 2008, there were 28 third party DS titles which made the million-sellers list, but the number reached 49 titles at the end of December. As the hardware expand their installed bases, we are starting to see a cycle where more titles from the third parties are making the million sellers list.
 

Jocchan

Ὁ μεμβερος -ου
Sadist said:
Yeah, 39 DS third party titles + 21 Wii third party titles. So it increased with 15 titles. Makes more sense.
DS titles are 49, so it would make the sum 70 as of Dec 08. Which wouldn't fit very well, unless third party sales collapsed in 2009 (only 5 more between Wii and DS?).
 

donny2112

Member
Jocchan said:
DS titles are 49, so it would make the sum 70 as of Dec 08. Which wouldn't fit very well, unless third party sales collapsed in 2009 (only 5 more between Wii and DS?).

As of the end of March 2008, there were only twelve titles for Wii by third parties whose global unit sales from the launches exceeded one million, and this figure excluded titles from Nintendo and Pokémon Company. However, this number jumped to thirty at the end of December 2008.

30 Wii third-party million-sellers at the end of 2008. That means 1) if the number is correct, it can't be including DS, and 2) it can't be 75 just for the Wii. Probably means something was mixed up between the actual shipments, the speaker, and the writer. :lol
 

Jocchan

Ὁ μεμβερος -ου
donny2112 said:
30 Wii third-party million-sellers at the end of 2008. That means 1) if the number is correct, it can't be including DS, and 2) it can't be 75 just for the Wii. Probably means something was mixed up between the actual shipments, the speaker, and the writer. :lol
Whoops, didn't read that (I assumed the 21 figure was as of December, lol).
Yeah, there's definitely something wrong.
 

DNF

Member
you are reading it wrong. the 75 third-party titles available in the US sold combined a total of 1 million units. only nintendo-games are selling on wii.
doh
 

Jokeropia

Member
I think total Wii third party sales in the US is at 75 million. They were at ~40 through September 08:

35l.jpg


It seems kinda steep to almost double in half a year, but look at the holiday bump 07 and factor in the bigger installed base this year (just compare the non-holiday months in 07 to 08) combined with the relative lack of first party competition.
 

markatisu

Member
Jokeropia said:
I think total Wii third party sales in the US is at 75 million.

Thats what I was thinking it meant as well since the GH series on Wii would easily make up almost 5 of that, Mario and Sonic sold 5m ww (2 something in the US) as well so thats 7-10 just between 3 games
 
Jokeropia said:
It seems kinda steep to almost double in half a year, but look at the holiday bump 07 and factor in the bigger installed base this year (just compare the non-holiday months in 07 to 08) combined with the relative lack of first party competition.
This is another time when looking at things in terms of amount of ownership can be handy. It's a minority fraction of the system's lifetime, but it's also the portion where by far the most people have owned it, so it counts for a lot more than any similar time period earlier in the system's life.

In my spreadsheet I usually use to calculate average weeks ownership, after September 2008 I've got Wii in the US at 572 million weeks owned total. After February 2009, it's 909 million. An increase of 60%. Along with that period including the holiday bump, an 87% increase in total third party game sales seems reasonable.
 

Threi

notag
Zachack said:
Threi woudn't have been banned if he was actually clever with the sarcasm, rather than coming across as petulant and whiny. I know you think he's on your "team" but you guys should really try to cull the chaff from your ranks.
First of all my friend I was not banned for sarcasm. It was a stupid reason I admit but it has nothing to do with this guerrilla warfare mentality you seem to be so committed to. Secondly, most of the posts from me are entirely tongue-in-cheek, so if they come off as petulant and whiny, that is really no big deal. It is probably better to pretend to be petulant and whiny than to actually be such. Putting thought into forum posts is overrated anyways.

Lastly if I make this so called team look bad, then you probably should pull this guy in a corner and give him a stern talking to. Because if I shared your mentality of failing to acknowledge everyone as an individual and not part of some sort of faction I would probably draw the conclusion that your "team" is composed of idiots so hopelessly devoted to their console of choice that they feel that their looping composite avatars of console exclusive games will one day earn them recognition from a multi-million dollar company as being one of the proud soldiers that "fought the good fight".
 
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