This thread does put up a good defence for PASBR though. There is a definite point that you can't call a game FLOP just because of its first week and this thread proves it.

The only thing that is against this thread is that PASBR isn't as well received as LBP was, LBP might have had great legs due to its quality.

nothing against those legs which are very good but you all realize first week (week 0 in op) was only north america and europes first week alone was more than 110k right?

first week

Japan: 49,839

Europe: 137,987

USA: 93,645 (110k north america)

+whatever rest of the world

so, the first three weeks you have in your op were all release weeks for the game, first north america, then japan and the third europe. that's why the fourth week is the first with a decline.

"real" first week sales are ~300k with 1.8m sold units after 8 (europe),9 (japan) and 10 (north america) weeks.

first week of psabr (if we got this thread because of this) is only without japan if i'm not wrong.

Well, to be fair, LBP was a generally new type of game, not genre since it is a platformer but they really got the whole "create, share, play" ball rolling. PSABR, as much as I love it, is the only semi-big budget game to try the battle arena genre coined by Nintendo with Smash bros. The game will be fine. Just give it time and spread the word.

People "crying" 'legs because of price' forget that just because a game is 30$ (not 10$, this is a retail greatest hits for most of its life), people still need to buy it. There are plenty of games that are 10$ and 5$ that don't sell as much.

Bad OP.

First say what your point is and don't let others guess.
Second your example is extremely poor.

- street date was broken in the US (therefore week 0)
- it came out later in Europe, thus making the legs look better and the first week look lower

True weekly sales are:

week 1: 454k
week 2: 190k
week 3: 122k

220k US (week 0+1)+ 138k Europe (week 1) + 50k Japan (week 1)+ 41k Others sales (week 0+1) + unknown amount of Others sales (for countries with the same release date as Europe)= 450k (rounded)

Also there is a little problem because there are countries in the Others region where the game launched in the same week as in Europe. So the week 1 sales should be a bit higher and the week 2 sales a bit lower.

Barozi it's funny that you could say the op is vague, yet understand the op point of "games that don't sell well at first doesn't mean they are flops" (hence your trying to argue the point with first week sales), and then entirely miss the point completely. All in one post.

The point is that flops cannot be determined so early in a games life. Disagree? I'm sure you do. Looking at your own numbers for week one would've left lbp with a 75% dropoff second week. Yet it went on to 5 m.

LBP didnt flop........but LBP 2 did, LBP Vita did, LBP PSP did, LBP karting did.

How did you miss those games?!?!?!

is he point of this thread that lbp franchise didnt flop?

no. the point is that early sales are not good predictors for later success.

The dropoff is 58% and that's exactly between 1/2 and 1/3 but nowhere near 1/4. Besides, many big games have huge (50%+) drops in its second week.

Also if the first week is 450k and that only 2 months before Christmas, no one would think that it's not gonna make 1 or 2m anytime soon. Sure LBP did more than expected, but it's not comparable to any other PS3 game right now, not even its own sequel.

Launch LBP now and it would do much worse. Not this year or next but in the long term due to the new consoles.

Again I don't know what games you're referring to but are you expecting for example PSASBR to do LBP like or even only half the numbers with W1 sales of 131k (still a bit overtracked according to NPD) and W2 sales of 35k ?
W1 sales were 29% of LBP's W1 sales. Even expecting the same incredible legs (selling good amounts in 4 years - > 2016) would mean 1.46m sales in 2016 and that is really the best case possible.

Week Ending Dec 1 2012.

98 Forza Motorsport 3
99 Diablo III PC Activision
100 PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

lol /thread