| Train wreck said: My take: Graphic defining dudebro game for a popular sport in the US There will be higher sales of the PS4 version due to its being on par with the One (and more popular than the PS3 in the US) The Xbox One price cut will help spur sales of this game on that console The current PS4/One userbase (6 million) is over 2x greater than the Wii U (2.5) So what are the reasons for Mario Kart to lead that month again? |
*Sigh*
Can't believe we even have to adress this... but... here goes.
http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/41784/USA/ EA UFC Preorders= 47,480 with 4 weeks left. We don't know the XBone numbers, but we do know that they'd be less than 29K as the game didn't chart. With an optimistic 28.5K (the max possible for the game not to chart) we have just about 75K. With four weeks left to go, Mario Kart 8 had about double that.
Oh, and at this point before launch, Undisputed 3 had 92K on XBox and 80K on PS3. First two weeks sales were about 450K according to VGChartz #s. Going by that ratio, we would somewhere around 250-300K from June 17th-30th.
The best selling sports games on PSonex4station is Madden. First month sales of both versions totalled about 400K. Those were launch titles so they didn't have the install base in their favor, but they had the benefit of being launch titles. We're also using 4 weeks instead of 2 to help balance things out. PS4 version had about 80K preorders 4 weeks prior to launch. XBox One was <60. Those were full months, not abbreivated months. They were also holiday months. To have a chance, UFC would have to be the biggest sports titles on the XBoner4. Going by preorder ratios, we'd have sales of about 250K or so.
Ok, so there were launch games? Fine. Let's look at the show for PS4.
The show sold 160K US in its first two weeks. If we buff that number up to account for XBOne numbers, we'd get something like 280K accounting for the fact that games have been selling better on the 4. The show had 31K preorders at this point. So, if we assume sales of EA UFC would be proportionate, an estimate based on preorders would be about 372K.
For the sake of another comparison, Infamous 2nd Son had about 220K preorders at four weeks from launch. So, assuming the maximum possible number of preorders for the uncharted XBone version, that means UFC has about 1/3 of the preorders of infamous. If we assume 1/3 the preorders means 1/3 of the sales, that would lead to about 180k for the PSFortyOne SKUS of UFC.
For comparison's sake, Infamous sold about 480K in its first two weeks. UFC would likely have to sell 4/5 as well to have a reasonable chance of beating out MK. 4/5 as well with 1/3 of the preorders seems unlikely unless the preorder figueres are not even in the ballpark of reality.
So that gives us a pretty broad estimate of the expectations. It's a pretty broad estimate, 200-380K seems like a reasonable one. That would not seem to me to be enough to take out Mario Kart, but, let's look at that too.
Pikmin 3 in its first month (I'm assuming NPD runs from the first to the 30th of the month), sold about 137 K. Tropical Freeze about 175K. Super Mario 3D World about 418K. All of those games had relatively the same number of preorders (87K for Pikmin and about 100K for each Mario and DK). Mario had a holiday boost. MK8 is about triple those games in preorders. So about 400K-430K would be a conservative estimate ignoring the factor of bundles. Two days of sales however will be cut off.
To compare Mario Kart 8 to some non Nintendo games, we'll go back to Infamous. Infamous has about 330K preorders heading into launch week compared to 280K for MK. About 84%. If we assume that Mario Kart has 84% of Infamous's first month sales, we'd have 472K. If we instead use 70% (to account for the 2 days of sales in May), we have 394K.
Mario Kart 7 first month sales were about 1.3 million. Preorders were about 423K. Using that ratio we'd have 840K sales for MKate. Using a hardware ratio instead, the 3DS had 4.1 million sold at the end of the year. The Wii U has sold 2.67. If we assume the games have a roughly equal attach rate, first month sales at about 650K. So, a range of 650K-840K. Holidays play a factor in this as well. If we assume holidays double sales, we'd have a range of something like 325K-420K. That being said, the figure of 325K seems exceedingly low for a game with 280K preorders. Assuming the VGChartz numbers are worth anything (which they may not be), 350K would seem like the most pessimistic estimate within the realm of possibility.
So yeah. I threw out a whole lot of numbers there. Just giving a variety of perspectives based on preorders, past entries in the franchise, preorder figures, and install bases. No one estimate can really incorporate all of the factors (and none of them facored in hardware bundles). But through our various estimates, it seems that a good guess for MK June sales would be 400-500K. A best case scenario would be about 6-700K. A worst case scenario would be 300-400K.
To beat that, UFC would have to sell about as well as Infamous and UFC Undisputed 3 did in their first weeks did to have a good chance of beating out Mario Kart. That seems very unlikely given the relative number of preorders, and in the case of Undisputed 3, the relative install base. At the same time, we'd need the worst case scenario numbers for Mario Kart of less than 400K. That would mean that we'd need Mario Kart 8 to vastly underperform compared to games with similar preorder figures, underperform compared to similar entries in its franchise relative to install base, and not receive any benefit from bundling.
So, we've learned 2 things today. 1, your prediction is silly. 2, having insomnia sucks.
