| Aielyn said:
I didn't say it would be ahead of the Wii version by midyear, I said it would sell better - meaning, total lifetime sales. My prediction of 300-400k is short-term, basically to June. I'd expect to see it getting closer to 900k lifetime, but it's hard to judge. My point about EA's handling of Fifa is that Fifa is a huge franchise in Europe, EA should have been able to drive sales of the game on all systems. The fact that Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed on the Wii U was able to sell at a decent rate (relative to Wii U sales) in the UK proves that the problem wasn't Fifa being multiplatform, Wii U system sales, or anything like that. As for Skylanders, I'm not sure what you're arguing about - as I said, I'd thought the franchise was doing better in the UK than it actually was. 800k in the next 9 weeks isn't a given, but it's achievable, if Nintendo handles things properly. Like I said, I'm assuming Nintendo has a plan to get themselves to that 4 million shipped number. And you note that it depends on whether Nintendo was basing the estimate on the "cards already on the table". The reason why it takes about 4 weeks for Nintendo to release their financial report is that they have to do analysis and make plans before reporting to investors. If the projections were already looking unlikely on January 23rd (time of the Wii U Direct), they wouldn't have left them at those values on January 26th. They could easily have reduced it to 3.5 million and saved face in April with little impact in January. So I stand by my prediction that they've got some plans to push the system, that don't involve actual price cuts (note: they could bundle NSMB U with both the basic and premium packs for the next 6 months without upping the price, and thus have an effective price cut without an actual price cut). The very fact that Nintendo held that Wii U Direct, which announced more than we'd normally hear from Nintendo, suggests that Nintendo did make new plans, and are already in the process of enacting them. And Iwata wouldn't have blatantly ruled out any price cut on January 26th if recent numbers were a concern to Nintendo - he could easily have couched it in terms like "We do not currently expect to require a price cut" - thereby enabling them to simply go "situation has changed, we need to drop the price", and there's no problem. |
No Dragon Quest game has ever tripled its three month sales. That period of time generally makes up 90+% of ther lifetime sales. If it is only at 300k in June, it won't hit 900k. Even insanely leggy games don't usually do that in Japan. NSMB DS got about 47% of its total sales in that period. The Wii version 79%. Wii Fit 45%. The only game I've been able to find that managed it was Nintendogs. Considering Dragon Quest isn't a new casual IP being released on a platform that will become the best selling in Japan, it seems unlikely that it can manage those legs.
My point with Skylanders is that you said we can't trust the data and it is higher than it looks. While this might technically be true as in 3,697 is more than 3,691, it is pretty meaningless. We know the first week was incredible low. It was more than 10 places below a game that sold ~1,600 units. We know it hasn't made the top 10 Wii U chart in any week, and we know the barrier to enter that chart is extremely low.
As for the rest, we'll just have to wait and see if Nintendo has anything in the wings by March. They don't exactly have the best track record for hitting their hardware forecasts. Last fiscal year they missed on all three systems from their stated forecasts in Q3 to the actual figures in Q4. And of course all of their forecasts for this current fiscal year have been slashed. In the 2010 fiscal year they also missed on all 3 systems from Q3 to Q4. The craziest of which was them keeping their forecast of 6.8 million DS units for Q4 when they only shipped 1.82 million. History shows they have made bad forecasts ever since Wii and DS sales dropped, but I guess we'll see come April.
