Media Create Sales Mar 12 - Mar 18

[binary solo]

logic56 said:

binary solo said:
Let's face it, unless Vita gets an exclusive Monster Hunter portable game it's going down in a screaming heap in Japan. There's no other IP in Japan that can even get within shouting distance of the big Nintendo handheld franchises. The MH games are the only million sellers on PSP in Japan, as such they hold great importance to the potential success of PSV

lol really??

did anyone think Monster Hunter was going to be as big as it was on the psp??

sure am glad most people here are not in charge of, well anything.

one game isn't on the console yet and no game is pushing units 4 months into the consoles lauch, that clearly means no games ever made ever from now on will do anything at all, lets call it quits abandon ship. Don't know about you but that makes a lot of sense to me. *sarcasm off*

Well, yes actually, I would expect MH to be as big (over time) on PSV as it was on PSP. Has MH suddenly taken a major downturn in popularity? Quite the opposite in fact. The MH franchise has increased in popularity on PSP with each suceeding title. It's very reasonable to expect an exclusive PSV MH title to be very popular on PSV and convince many MH fans to buy a PSV.

Try using some logic and objectivity, rather than sarcasm, when analysing future sales prospects. The only way to peer into the future is to look at what has gone before and  think about how the past influences and predicts the future. Fact: no new IP introduced for PSP was hugely popular in Japan, none. Monster Hunter was the only one, single, no other to sell multi-million units. Not even very high quality existing franchise titles like MGS, with some MH tie in stuff, or a Kingdom Hearts spin off could manage sales comparable to MH.

The probability, therefore, that new IP introduced for PSV this year, or next, will become hugely popular and drive a major increase in sales is quite low. So far, while it's early days yet, no new IP has really captured the attention of gamers. The probability of an exclusive MH title driving sales of PSV (especially driving people to convert from PSP to PSV) is quite high, certainly higher than a new IP doing this. Therefore with these probabilities in mind the negative effect on PSV's prospects of not having a MH title within the next year or so, or at least annonced, is significant. PSV will continue to sell but at fairly low numbers, and Sony will have a difficult time significantly increasing PSV sales in Japan.

Sony can do a lot by transferring several moderately popular franchises from PSP to PSV: God Eater, Phantasy Star, some sort Gundam, and a Final Fantasy spin off. Those franchises will certainly give PSVs baseline sales a boost when put together. But none of them would have the effect MH would, even collectively.

MH in Japan for PSP is like Halo for Xbox in America. It is a key franchise for hardware sales. Losing it would be a major blow, and a non-trivial threat to PSV's long term prospects. Even moving it to multiplatform on 3DS and PSV would be a significant loss. In the very least Sony would need to scramble to find a wildly popular exclusive game franchise to take its place, which if we consider all game platforms is not an easy thing to do.

It is true that the success or failure of PSV does not rest solely on MH. But it's naive to think Monster Hunter isn't important to PSV's future.

Is it possible a new IP or several new IPs will see PSV achieve PSP-like sales levels? Yes. But is it likely? Not really.