| Torillian said: Well within the first 7 weeks of sales it had done 250,000 in sales. Which was far before the budget price. Seems fair to me to say it made money. |
What matters most for VC is that it performed well enough, both critically and commercially to lock in a franchise future. We've already seen an anime series (not sure if this was pre-planned as a promotional strategy, or if the game actually came second to the series), and we already have confirmation of the next VC game on PSP.
At this point, whether it broke even or pulled a decent profit is somewhat irrelevant. The only thing that would potentially be changed based upon how well it profited would be expansion across other platforms in the future.
And while it's a bit unfortunate that half of the sales happened AFTER it went bargain price, Sega could have done a better job of having more copies available (launch seemed limited, but not surprising due to the limited niche genre), and maybe even made more of a token effort to market outside of the anime series released well after debut.
It may well be that the growing excellent word of mouth, good press and sudden discount all added up to huge sales post initial release from those who now had little reason not to buy the game. Personally, I bought a copy for the exact reason even though I wasn't in a position to actually play through the game at the time.
