| The Ghost of RubangB said: This is the 4th No More Heroes release (worldwide anyway). We've had the original, the 2-in-1 double pack with Red Steel, the sequel, and now the HD remake. The original had no hype and no advertising, and flopped in Japan, then went on to be a mild indie success in the west (almost half a million sales so far). After 2 years and 4 months of fans on the internet talking about how awesome it is, this 4th No More Heroes release also flopped in Japan, on a BIGGER userbase than the Wii had in 2007. So now that it's an established franchise, this is probably a bigger flop. For the Wii version, the Japanese sales were only 8.333% of the worldwide sales. This HD remake doesn't even have a publisher for western release, because Ubisoft doesn't support it, and neither does Suda51 or Grasshopper. This remake was Marvelous's idea, and they had it ported by feelplus. Marvelous needs money really bad, and I highly doubt they're celebrating after these launch numbers. If anything, we should all be worried about the sales being this low. Now we have to hope a publisher sees this and thinks, "Oh hell yeah, 14K sales? I will gladly pay to bring this game to America!" It's a great game and a great franchise and it should sell more on every platform. But if you want to support the people who made the game, Grasshopper, buy the Wii version. If you want the controls the game was designed for, buy the Wii version. If you honestly don't care about the controls, turn in your gamer card. And if you want some extra loading times, and extra pixels on Travis's abs, because that's what makes games more enjoyable for you, buy the 360 version (because the PS3 version is censored). This whole "casual userbase" mumbo jumbo has got to stop. Great games can flop on any userbase. The PS2 is supposedly a magical console with the perfect userbase, the most casuals and the most hardcore, the most diverse library of all time... and yet Psychonauts bombed so hard Majesco's CEO resigned and the company almost died, and Okami bombed so hard that Capcom shut down Clover. Luckily Majesco had a comeback with Cooking Mama on the DS and Wii, and Clover (reborn as Platinum) had a comeback with MadWorld on the Wii. |
However, that's not the only way to look at the sales of those two titles on PS2.
For Psychonauts it was mainly considered to be an original xbox title and people that would buy it on PS2 would know they weren't going to get the best version of the game on PS2, so unless they also had an original xbox console, they probably weren't going to buy it. And it was an american made platformer, a strange enough beast and hard to guage it's sales at any time, at a time when platformers really weren't that popular.
And for Okami, it was coming out at a point in the PS2's lifetime when most people were already looking towards the next gen and the only PS2 games people were looking forward to were FFXII and God of War 2. Okami might have faired better in 2001-2003 when there was a level of excitement about new ips on the PS2.
