Famitsu sales (8/3 - 8/9)

[johnsobas]

edjevink said:
It's all about expectations. Looking at the expectations that Capcom, Nintendo, retailers and gamers had for this game, and looking at the sales of the first 2 weeks, than all i can say is this: The sales of Monster Hunter 3 did not meet expectations, FOR NOW.

I mean, the last 2 Monster Hunter games sold 892.000 and 1.439.000 copies in 2 weeks time. With that knowledge the 700.000 copies sold of Monster Hunter 3 doesn't sound like a lot. And yes, it's already the best-selling third party game in Japan, on current-gen consoles, and it will probably reach 1 million copies. BUT, if Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3 would sell 700.000 copies in 2 weeks than everybody would call it a bomb. Why? Because sales of previous Final Fantasy games give higher expectations.

I'm not saying Monter Hunter 3 bombed, it's too early to tell, but it's sales sure didn't meet my expectations. And looking at the current MH3 price at certain Japanese retailers i think we all can agree that MH3 sales of the first two weeks didn't meet their(retailers) expectations as well.

People need to stop comparing MH3 to the PSP games, they aren't comparable.  It's a social phenomenon born on handhelds and built on the premise of playing with a friend next to you in a country where you don't spend that much time at home.  There is plenty of evidence of this, the ps2 games didn't sell nearly as much as the PSP ones either.  People didn't know how much to expect this time, MH grew in popularity greatly after the last 2 PSP iterations were released so people knew MH3 was gonna sell better than the previous PS2 versions but they didn't know how much because there was no way to measure it.  For retailers it was a bit of a guessing game and they slightly overshipped it, honestly 70% sell through after 2 weeks isn't as much of a disaster as you make it out to be, the problem is that the stand alone game sell through is more like 50% while the bundles are nearly sold out.