Mummelmann said:
Tyritorious said:
First of all, we don't know their sales expectations for this game. So we cannot assume that the expectations placed on most games apply to this one. I'll fill you in on something I heard from the Giant bombcast concerning massive sales projections.
Games can be considered "failures" even if they go past breaking even. Why is this? Big publishers need their "hits" to do well enough to cover potential "misses". So developers not only have to develop a game that does well for them, it also has to do well enough to cover for other developers within the same company whose performance could hurt the publisher. Most major game publishers are held to this standard, but I don't think Nintendo is.
Even if this game was (which I highly doubt), we don't know the development costs and sales expectations for Splatoon. We only have an idea of how much they're spending on marketing and no key data associated with development costs. Wait until we have more evidence before declaring it a failure... |
Personally, I think it has outperformed even Nintendo's expectation.
It was never going to be huge in the West but it has done well regardless even at a much higher price and it did really well in Japan and even had a great second week and helped the hardware move as well.
Overall, I think Nintendo are happy, and they should be.
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Thing is, I think a game like Splatoon is built more for a Western audience than an Eastern one. It's a competitive, multiplayer-centric, third person shooter. This isn't the sort of thing Japan usually goes crazy over. Which is why I find it surprising it's doing so much better in Japan than the US. Sales are sales regardless but it kind of flipped my expectations.
