VGChartz way overtracked Zack & Wiki - Z&W was a commercial failure

[theRepublic]

Let's assume Sven is right and Capcom only sold 300k to retailers. At about $20 for the publisher, that should be around $6 million in revenue. Factor in the $2 million dollar ad campaign in Japan and pretty much no advertising anywhere else, and that means this game cost at least $4 million to make.

If advertising is 9-12% of gross sales as he claims, lets see what they were planning on selling in Japan. I'll use 10% for ease. That means they were planning on $20 million on gross sales in Japan alone. At $50 dollars a game, that means they were planning on selling 400,000 units in Japan alone.

If they were expecting 400k in Japan, what does that mean they were expecting in America? Europe and others? It sounds to me like Capcom was expecting at least 1 million units sold worldwide.

Games like No More Heroes and de Blob were already declared financial successes at around 300k or so. There is a confirmed sequel for No More Heroes, and THQ is talking about a sequel for de Blob if I'm not mistaken.

All this leads up to the conclusion that Capcom vastly overestimated the demand for this game. It sounds like too much money was spent on development, and too much was spend on the ad campaign in Japan.