Trusty Bell - first shipment

[mrstickball]

fooflexible said:

mrstickball said:
I think BD hitting 200k is near a certainty, even without Trusty Bell.

Blue Dragon sold 693 copies last week, and is only 11,470 units away from hitting 200k LTD.

This might seem like a lot of units to cover, since it's only selling 700 a week. However, BD has done well when 360 hardware has done well. 1 month ago, it sold 1800 in one week when the 360 sold 3,500 units due to Golden Week.

Thats a 60% decrease over 4 weeks - not bad considering the X360 hardware dropped 40% in sales in the same period. One would say it doesn't bode well.

But then you check early April, and Blue Dragon was selling 1,200 per week.

So after everything's said and done, since April, sales have decreased a mere 600 units/wk in 2 months. That's pretty good. Add in the fact that Trusty Bell could move 5,000 hardware units (at a very very low prediction), and we should see Blue Dragon hit 190,000 units LTD easy, or even 192,000~193,000. So it only has to move 7,000 units for the rest of it's life.

Honestly? I'll go out on a limb and say that Blue Dragon has enough gas in it (provided Trusty Bell moves 10,000 h/w units or more, and keeps the 360 sustained for a month before it goes down to 2,000 h/w a week), to reach 210,000 at a minimum, and even hit 225,000 at the end, as it should get a strong increase when Lost Odyssey launches.

A 50/50 over/under ratio for Blue Dragon is somewhere at 210~215k (50/50 chance it breaks 215k), atleast in my estimation. It's had a great run thus far, and sales have proven via Golden Week, that when hardware sales boost, so does Blue Dragon's sales.

A final example:

Blue Dragon's VGChartz ranking in 2/18/2007: #84
Blue Dragon's VGChartz ranking in 6/03/2007: #122

Dropping 40 places in 3 and 1/2 months is nothing short of amazing for an RPG.

 

mr stickball your cracking me up with your intensive analysis of whether Blue Dragon will stop at 190,000 or continue to 225,000. Hardly seems worthy of debate unless your passionate about the 360's success in japan. Which btw I am, I'm probably second behind you for wanting this. I think these three games(TB, BD, and LO) really need to prove something by year end, or alot of Japanese developers will pretty much permenantly make up their mind about 360 development. Although if they manage a silmiliar price cut to what they are talking about here like the 200 dollar core system I don't see how Japan can pass it up. Imagine seeing Blue dragon for 30 bucks with $200 core system, and Lost Odyessy on the shelf. And there is enough other titles I beilieve to tempt the Japanese audience, I really don't see that failing horribly. Or at least I'll be shocked if people continue to ignore it's presence.

 

The big reason I care is that I love JRPGs, and have since the early 1990s. Unfortunately, since the SNES golden age, sales have plummeted, or just been lackluster for fanastic series such as Chrono Trigger (sold 200,000 units in the US), or virtually any game in the old Square and Enix catalogues (I could name 25 great SNES RPGs that I beat from memory).

I can and will gladly provide any analysis on any RPG out there, for any system if it comes out. The big reason I care about BD isn't just for BD's sake, but for Mistwaker, which seems to be one of the few new companies that is trying to challenge the SE hegemony on the JRPG market (yes, you have Namco-Bandai, but lately they haven't had any uber-hits to the SE level).

I look at it as I did Sega - when you look through the DC and Sat. sales, you see some brilliant games (Crazy Taxi, Shining Series, Phantasty Star, Sonic, ect), and you saw some incredible, noteworthy spikes. Although the systems were statistically irrelevant compared to the PS1, the X360 is in a similar position as the DC - it has the ultra-fantastic software coming for it, and I just think it's great to see something like Blue Dragon make 360 hardware jump 750% in one week. Could you imagine if Super Mario Galaxy pushed Wii sales from 100,000 a week to 750,000 for a week? Every Nintendo fanboy and analyist would be going crazy. I'm just doing the same for my own console. If we had more fanboys that actually gave a rats behind about their consoles, and amagamated them into a very strong league, we'd have more accuracy that Patcher ever would dream of. If a fanboy can get beyond their wishful thinking and provide relevant analysis, like TheSource has, then it's a great day in gaming history. If anything, the world is short a few video game analyisers.

Not only this, but if you can predict such an utterly small game like BD, you have a knack for doing decent on the larger games....Which is what I attribute my succuess in the prediction league to.

IMO, the battle between Trusty Bell and Folk Soul will be grand, as it'll probably be the largest JRPG battle until we see who Lost Odyssey is up against. Again, I think that intensive analysis of TB and BD is important, because what if LO sells 250k, or 350k, or 500k in Japan? If it ended up around 500k, we'd have a major franchise coming on our hands that no one saw, then the Dreamcast is within the 360s reach, and would be the biggest sales increase in history for any platform. But thats just wishful thinking. Until then, I have to occupy my time 'till I can buy a copy of BD in the USA.