What are they suppose to do not release it and lose more money?

I was just saying that to prove a point. Every developer (I hope) wants this game to be a success so they can continue to make games. I don't think that they know beforehand that their game is going to lose money. Or they hope it won't.

You're missing the point! Sellthrough of initial shipping cannot be a measure of a game's success or an estimation of publisher's expectation.

A publisher must have a clear idea of (minimum) expectation of sales when they first greenlight any project presented to them by a developer because a budget must be allocated!

That initial expectation could be drastically dfferent from retailer's demand.

If a game sells close to all of its shipment don't you think it was the retailers underestimating rather than the publishers overestimating? I think its obvious that Fragile will sell close to  all of its shipment for the whole week  If Namco expected it to sell more then they should have tried to persuade the retailers to order more. It can't sell more than what is there.  Also I'm sure the developers/publishers expectations of how much of a game will sell changes dozens of times. It may have started out as looking profitable and then expectations lowered and the main goal was to have as much money returned as possible.

The ultimate goal of all games as far as a publisher concern is obviously to turn a profit, all expenditures are merely investments that can either net a solid return or turn sour as with any endeavour with elements of chance.

How can any publisher consider that a game has met with their expectation when it does not turn a profit? Again we are talking about initial expectation here versus comments that the sellthrough we are seeing here means the game did well.

It did not do well, it did no meet the publisher's expectation, the only thing you can say is that the publisher were resigned to the lost when it became obvious that retailers were ordering a pitiful initial shipment.

There is nothing a publisher can do at that point, but I doubt any publisher will be claiming that a 45% first day sellthrough of such a small shipment is 'as they expected' and 'satisfactory' when you consider the budget of this game.

I keep mentioning this in other threads, but Fragile is a fairly weak game--if it were to sell a ton of copies (lifetime) I'd (further) question the sanity of Japanese gamers.

The game is actually in my top ten on wii after 7hrs of playing it today. I don't think it is as weak as you say. Obviously I don't think it is weak at all.

@mibuokami Yeah but outlawauron asked about the developers knowing about it flopping before release, and said nothing about the initial expectations.

Well if the games sells out in alot of stores after selling all or most of its shipment do you think that people are going to quit and not buy it when the next shipment comes? A game selling close to all of its shipment shows that the demand of the game is most likely higher the retailers thought. Meaning that there won't be as high of a drop off the next week depending how much higher the demand is. While it doesn't say the game is a sucess right away it could show that in the future the game could become more sucessful. Think of it like there was always a number of people who would buy the game. The retailers thought this number of people would be lower than what it really was so they ordered less than what was demanded. The game sold almost all of its shipment or maybe even all. There are people who couldn't find the game. The game has legs the next week and sells very well the second week. We don't even know what the budget was or if it made a profit or not. We also don't know if Namco is planning to localize it or not, and we don't know how much it will sell lifetime in Japan,Other regions, or Worldwide. So isn't it a little early to call it a flop? The only thing we can do now is speculate and give our opinion on if it flopped or not based off this speculation.

I just don't think it'll do well based off of the legs of past JRPGs on the Wii. That's all. I hope it sells well.

And yes the drop is much less severe the next week if it sells out and stores need to order more shipments.

I can understand where you are coming from but considering the life time sale of most games with similiar sale pattern (around 45% first day sale) in Japan, I have high doubt this will make back the money that the publisher sink in its production.

Also considering how crap Namco is at localising, I don't have much hope, firstly I don't think this game will reach Pal territorry this year given Atari's history, which leaves NA only, so there is a good chance this game won't even reach more than 300k life time, that's less than 12 million in total revenue for Namco, and I highly doubt this game took less than that amount to make.

I hightly doubt the game has a higher developement cost than Red Steel-$12m  or Gears of War$10m(doesn't include UE3 engine). Over 10 million seems unrealistic to me.

I think if it was localised that it would sell similarly to the 360 version of eternal sonata which I'm certain had higher development costs.