Media Create Sales for 08-09 to 08-15 - Wii 3rd Party Struggling

[Chris_D]

Here are the software and hardware numbers from Japan, straight from Media Create, for the week 08-09 to 08-15.

It was a quiet week for software with no new releases in the top 10. Wii Party continued to sell strongly at number 1 with 124,489 copies sold. Sengoku Basara 3 for PS3 was at number 2 with 35,324 copies sold.

Sengoku Basara 3 for Wii has already dropped out of the top 10, currently at number 15, highlighting the struggle for 3rd party software on Wii in Japan. The Wii version has been outsold by the PS3 version by more than a factor of 4. This is despite Wii being the lead platform with the PS3 port not being much more than a resolution upgrade. For more discussion about the state of 3rd party on Wii, along with all things gaming in Japan, I highly recommend checking out episode 7 of WARNING! A Huge Podcast.

Edge had an interview last week with Takeshi Kajii and Hidetaka Miyazaki about the PS3 classic, Demon's Souls:

“I’m no fan of the genre westerners refer to as the JRPG,” says Takeshi Kajii, the producer at Sony Computer Entertainment who first approached From Software with the proposition to rediscover a lost breed of action game. “I’ve always loved the dark fantasy genre, from Wizardry right through to King’s Field. Yet games that assume that aesthetic these days are usually, at their heart, more like science-fiction. So my desire was to revisit this lost area of gaming, to rediscover a charismatic corner of the medium.”

For game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, the interest was shared. “I’d worked exclusively on Armored Core titles in my role at From Software,” he explains. “But I’d always wanted to make a dark fantasy game that drew on the Fighting Fantasy series of books. The Demon’s Souls project was that opening that I’d always been waiting for."

Perhaps for this reason, Demon’s Souls failed to perform in the way the team had hoped at release. “Initially, sales were poor,” says Kajii. “We sold between 20-30,000 copies in Japan the first week and, as the first feedback we had during development from TGS was not so good, we were really disappointed and worried that the project was going to fail. As a developer you immediately slip into a new mode of thinking, wondering if things would have been different if we’d focused on different features. It was a hard time.”

However, it wasn’t long before word of mouth began to turn the game’s fortunes around. “The contrast between how we felt around the time of release and when the game broke the 100,000 sales mark was gigantic,” says Miyazaki. Kajii sees the trend in development away from risk-taking projects such as Demon’s Souls as a problem for the industry, but is not pessimistic. “It is understandable that you want low risks in sure-win projects. So in recent years marketing has taken a much bigger role in defining what types of games are developed. There is little place for anything new and, as development costs rise, so the pie is just getting smaller.

Hardware and software sales for last week:

Hardware
PSP - 35,734 (+18%)
PS3 - 33,057 (+15%)
DSi LL - 27,923 (+33%)
Wii - 25,072 (+37%)
DSi - 24,850 (+36%)
360 - 5,065 (-10%)
DS Lite - 4,809 (+10%)
PS2 - 1,675 (+10%)
PSP Go - 608 (-14%)

Software
01. [Wii] Wii Party (Nintendo) - 124,489 / ~736k
02. [PS3] Sengoku Basara 3 (Capcom) - 35,324 / ~335k
03. [DS] Inazuma Eleven 3: Sekai e no Chousen!! (Level 5) - 28,215 / ~780k
04. [PSP] Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X (Namco Bandai Games) - 27,822 / ~136k
05. [PSP] Hatsune Miku: Project Diva 2nd (Sega) - 24,017 / ~301k
06. [Wii] Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Nintendo) - 20,873 / ~769k
07. [DS] Egokoro Kyoushitsu DS (Nintendo) - 16,895 / ~129k
08. [DS] Tomodachi Collection (Nintendo) - 15,243 / ~3,378k
09. [Wii] Dragon Quest Monsters: Battle Road Victory (Square Enix) - 14,803 / ~221k
10. [DS] Taiko no Tatsujin DS: Dororon! Youkai Daikessen!! (Namco Bandai Games) - 14,299 / ~180k

Source - Media Create, Edge, WARNING! A Huge Podcast.

See the sales from the previous week.

Note: Software cumulative sales estimates are provided by Media Create and VGChartz.

[menage]

I read the Demo Souls article in Edge and it was pretty good. I liked how the project just was developped without anyone butting in and making it more commercial. Which eventually reaped rewards of it's own.

They even talked about the idea of wiping your save game and setting you back to the start when you died, but admitted they probably were thinking too far. .

I hope there';s a sequel somehwere which develops ideas even more.

[KamaItachi]

That interview really makes me want to pick up Demon's Souls now, even though I'll have no time to play it I just want to give these guys a big thumbs up.

[Chris_D]

Demon's Souls alone made me feel completely justified in my purchase of a PS3 slim. My favourite game of this gen? Hard to say.

[divinechaos]

I really wanted to get Demon's Souls but I heard a couple of things about that just turned me away from the game. Apparently, you can't invite a friend to your game. The only way to get someone to play with you is to find their "soul" which differs by server. Also, I hate games with no checkpoints, especially when they an unforgiving difficulty. Everything else about the game sounds awesome, though.

[danhoo]

Originally Posted by divinechaos

I really wanted to get Demon's Souls but I heard a couple of things about that just turned me away from the game. Apparently, you can't invite a friend to your game. The only way to get someone to play with you is to find their "soul" which differs by server. Also, I hate games with no checkpoints, especially when they an unforgiving difficulty. Everything else about the game sounds awesome, though.

If you and your friend are in the same region (US, Japan, UK), you can sorta "invite" them to your game, but it takes some work. I was able to do this with a friend by agreeing before-hand on a specific location to drop a summoning stone, and it worked.

And yes, there aren't checkpoints, but there are level shortcuts that can be opened and stay open after you die and restart in most of the levels, which is better than nothing.

[Abyssion]

It's cool to see that someone else is listening to WAHP, I really enjoy listening to those guys. Though at time's there's some weird background noise, I think I hear a diner O_o

[Chris_D]

Yeah, I just recently got turned onto them. I really enjoyed their Last Ranker discussion in episode 7 but it makes me want the game right now!

[Abyssion]

They had an amazing interview with the creator of Deadly Premonition that was voiced by the actor that played the Francis York Morgan in the English version. That was how I first found the podcast because Shidoshi (I think) posted it on Giant Bomb's forums after they finished their endurance run, and I had beaten the game about a week before those guys did.

Listening to the interview made me all giddy. I almost want to import the game on the PS3 just to give Swery more support...

Last Ranker sounds really interesting, kinda makes me wish I knew how to read Kanji. Hopefully it'll get a US release one day.

[ElektroDragon]

Demon's Souls was the best game I ever had to sell due to sheer frustration. It would have been a fantastic game if they had changed the game structure so that it didn't play like a glorified Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. I hated the whole "visit other realms from a central hub and keep track of what world state each realm is in". And the whole ghost vs. flesh mechanic was also rather annoying and pointless. Together, these elements made the game needlessly complicated and repetitive.

Demon's Souls done in either a more linear JRPG story fashion, or a more open-world fashion like Fallout/Oblivion, without the stupid "world state change" system, would have probably been the best console RPG of all time.

[OldJadedGamer]

I won't buy Demon's Soul until they fix the bug with the locked save file. I've heard way too many people complain about losing hours and hours of game time because of it and I've already had my Slim break down on me once and I don't trust it again. I won't be buying any game with a locked save file.

[Gorvi]

Originally Posted by OldJadedGamer

I won't buy Demon's Soul until they fix the bug with the locked save file. I've heard way too many people complain about losing hours and hours of game time because of it and I've already had my Slim break down on me once and I don't trust it again. I won't be buying any game with a locked save file.

That's not a bug, it's a decision by the devs. I don't like it as I've lost my character that way when my PS3 died last year, but having already completed the game once it didn't bother me that much. Still, that's hardly a good reason to ignore a really good, unique game like Demon's Souls.

[Chris_D]

Indeed, you are missing out on possibly the best game of this gen. *shrug*