A few reasons, but some have already been stated:
#1. GameRepublic is not a major studio. Their other titles haven't been very big in the past, therefore they have no "street cred" in order to build off of for other titles.
#2. Tying in with #1, retailers were skeptical of ordering, since there most likely was very little interest and any pre-orders. Trusty Bell shipped 70k for its first week. Why? 23k were already pre-ordered by consumers, and retailers anticipated alot of consumer purchases.
#3. There was very little, if any news about this game in Japan. I didn't know of FS until like....4 weeks before it came out, and it started getting discussed here. For a game like FS to succueede, it has to have hype behind it, and FS had none.
#4. PS3 tier ratios are absymal. When there are 900k+ hardware units, and only around 1.5m software titles sold, I tend to believe the average PS3 purchaser really isn't going to attach to a game like FS so rabidly.
FS should wind up with around 30k, or so. Its funny that after the Forza 2 bomb, every PS3 fanboy was laughing at my 65k LTD prediction for FS being too low (I remember tons of PS3 fans saying 100k would be easy). My, how fanboyism eschews true estimates and predictions.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
