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the_dengle on 18 September 2013
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badgenome said:
the_dengle said:

That said, I don't think MH would have sold quite as well on the Vita. The MH faithful would have bought one, but it clearly has a larger market to attract on the 3DS.

I do think you can find that, sometimes, a game's target audience is resistant to buying a certain platform or a particular console's user base is more receptive to certain games. Certainly JRPGs didn't move the needle much for the 360, and there have been late Wii->PS3 ports that sold better than the original releases despite the much smaller user base.

While the 3DS does offer a potentially larger audience, jumping platforms didn't seem to do much to Monster Hunter's sales one way or the other. Of course we still have to see how the legs turn out, and there are other advantages to the 3DS - like the fact that Nintendo is willing to help push the series in the west, as futile an effort as that may be. But I suspect that at this point, you are either interested in MonHun... or you aren't. So I don't think that the size of the user base means much. I mean, if Capcom had jumped ship mid-generation from the PSP to the DS, Monster Hunter likely wouldn't have sold any better than it already did.

You are correct about that. Going from the 6-year-old PSP to the 2.5-year-old 3DS did not dramatically increase first-week sales of respective Monster Hunter games. But that doesn't have anything to do with the currently not-quite-2-year-old Vita.

Aside from that, your first paragraph makes it sound like you think Monster Hunter die-hards don't want to buy a 3DS for Monster Hunter, and/or that the general Vita audience overlaps more with the Monster Hunter audience than the general 3DS audience does. Either of these may have some truth to them, but given the fantastic sales of the series on 3DS, they can't both be true -- otherwise sales would be significantly lower than the PSP entries. You'll have a hard time selling me on either of the proposed theories, though, since I have my own anecdotal evidence to counter them. It won't mean anything to anyone else, of course, but having personal experience with Monster Hunter fans buying a 3DS for it and with 3DS owners who have never touched the series before loving everything about 3 Ultimate makes me less receptive to the above suggestions.