Race to 1M: Lost Odyssey Vs White Knight Story

[Riachu]

c0rd said:

tombi123 said:

I think it is certain that either LO or WKS will be the first JRPG this generation to sell 1M units. But which one will get that honour?

LO has LTD sales of 791K. It sell roughly 6.5K a week, worldwide. At this rate it will take roughly 32 weeks, or 8 months. Which would be at the end of April 2009. I think the holiday boost will help move an extra 30K units. Moving the date from the end of April, to the end of March 2009.

WKS is set for release on the 11th of December in Japan. This game has a lot of hype and should have a fairly big marketing push in Japan. The PS3 install base should be around 3M on release, so I would say 500K by the end of march 2009 isn't out of the question.

For this game to move 500K in the west before the end of March 2009, I would say it needs a mid February release at the latest, in NA and EU/PAL. Although that is possible for NA, I can't seeing it happening for EU/PAL.

My conclusion is that LO will make it to 1M first. Then, depending on the western release date, WKS will reach 1M within 2 months after LO.

Your thoughts...

I really don't know about that. LO will definitely take a while to crawl to the million seller mark, if it can even manage that. WKS is more of a gamble - people predicting it selling big are assuming 2 things:

1) The PS3 crowd has huge pent up demand for JRPG's (much more so than 360).
2) WKS can set itself apart from being just another typical JRPG.

I can understand how people come up with point #1, but I think it's being exaggerated quite a bit. As for point #2, I don't think it can pull that off too well either. What was the last new JRPG IP that went over a million? It isn't easy to pull off. I don't doubt it can make a million, but it won't rocket up there.

As to why I bolded the quote - Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is definitely a contender for the first JRPG million seller. It's doing fine in Japan, probably headed to near 280k by early next year. The first title did great in the west, and if advertised well, hitting a million shouldn't be a problem. Since the Wii userbase is so large, and Tales has barely any competition in the RPG genre, the game may see some decent legs. If Tales is released before WKS in the west (unsure about Europe), I doubt WKS will be able to catch up. If Tales is out in Europe before the holidays, I'd lean on it hitting a million first, if not I'll give it to LO on this one.

Aren't both of these statements true?  Unless of course many of the 360 owners were previous JRPG loving PS2 owners.