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Louie on 23 January 2009
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Zucas said:
Louie said:
Zucas said:
Yep Fragile did what most people expected in Japan and apparently Namco Bandai knew that as well. Only shipped about 40,000 and it'll sell about 30k-35k in its first week. I guessed 50k first week and 100k LT so I'll be pretty spot on for totals.

Not surprising considering new IPs continue to bomb in Japan. Namco better make sure they release this outside of Japan.

 

Again, Namco Bandai doesn't decide how much units will be shipped at launch. Hey Zucas you know that

True but its silly to think that developers don't have an idea already of how much shipments they can expect to release first week.  They wouldn't be very good developers if they didn't know that.  This is why many people's expectations of about 50k first week was pretty well justified and I'm sure Namco knew this as well. 

Retailers order them, but the publisher already has a good idea of how much that's going to be anyways. But of course I knew that, it's just it would also be silly to think the publisher didn't know that also which is what I was trying to say.

 

 

During the devlopement process it surely will be obvious at some point how much the game is going to sell but there surely are a lot of games that the developers overestimate. When you start development you should think about the number of units you want your game to sell. If you want it to sell really well you will give it a higher budget. What I mean is the developers know about the rough sales figures some months prior to release but only when it's too late to change the concept of the game.

I don't say Namco was dissapointed by the numbers they surely did know it wouldn't sell a quadrillion copies at launch. But it is still possible they started with higher expectations.

but I don't want to discuss Fragile sales (I hope the game sells well) I'm just confused by the huge amount of people who claim a game is a success when it sells 50% of its shipment on day one. If you originally expected the first shipment to be 250k copies (and I mean one year prior to release because that's what matters) and the shipment is only 100k in the end you surely will be dissapointed even if the game sells 80% of its shipment on day one.

If developers really knew what the shipment numbers would be at launch there wouldn't be a single developer going bankrupt, right? You don't start developing a game with the thought: "Oh well this game is gonna make us one million dollars so we'll give it a budget of 2 million".

So yeah maybe Namco knew how big the first shipment would be at some point but that doesn't mean it was their plan to sell 20k copies on day one. If their budget was 2 million dollars they surely wouldn't be pleased with 20k units even if it was 50% of the shipment. You don't know for sure how much a game will sell when you give it a certain budget and that's what matters.