| Shadowblind said: Here I'd have to disagree with you, if for no other reason then the fact that Tales of Graces, which actually got marginally better scores then Vesperia sold only 220,000 throughout its entire life, and was on the highest selling home console in Japan at the time. Also, word of mouth about Vesperia was apparently very strong; at least, critical word of mouth was. Granted, though, my disagreeing with you is of a very thin nature-- I only disagree that it would have sold twice it's current amount, since that would make it roughly 1.6 mil if you meant worldwide, or over 1.2 mil(rounded) if you just included Japan PS3 sales. Thats more then any Tales game has ever sold, and while it'd be awesome, spectacular, incredible, and a large list of other positive adjectives if sales had been that high, it'd be extremely unlikely. I'm not familiar with the artist story, so I can't comment on it. Can you link me to it? |
Graces' sales were a result of Namco doing its best to draw the Tales fanbase to two other consoles earlier in the generation.
The ultimate issue facing the Japanese industry, as has been touched upon somewhat indirectly earlier in this thread, is that there is no PS2-like home console this generation. Third parties split up the market by spreading their products across three different consoles, strangely putting the most effort early on into a console everybody knew would be doomed to failure in the region in the long run. Given the market they've created, they are now essentially required to increase development costs by going multiplatform with every game, and yet even when doing this they still aren't guaranteed the sales they once enjoyed with the PS2.
Had Japanese developers centered their focus on either Wii or PS3 at the start of this generation, the marketplace would be much healthier for all involved.
