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MontanaHatchet on 18 June 2008
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FishyJoe said:

If you look at past sales trends, MGS is much more front loaded in Japan. MGS3 fell very fast after a couple weeks. In America it started slow, I'm not sure why. I'd guess America will have a more front loaded selling pattern for MGSIV.

Region Japan America Others Total
Total Sales 0.86m 1.42m 1.70m 3.98m
Week 1 493,827 183,805 411,100 1,088,732
Week 2 115,054 156,318 189,696 461,068
Week 3 79,141 87,101 74,913 241,155
Week 4 46,779 122,559 51,299 220,637
Week 5 19,900 142,575 34,818 197,293
Week 6 10,365 177,632 25,073 213,070
Week 7 7,575 40,432 23,931 71,938
Week 8 4,913 23,834 19,529 48,276
Week 9 4,322 18,265 17,939 40,526
Week 10 3,511 15,102 17,794 36,407

If you take a quick glimpse over the history of Metal Gear Solid 3, you'll understand why the American sales were so unusual. I'll save you the trouble in these two statements:

1. MGS3 was hyped, but it was nearly swallowed by the hype of two far larger competitiors, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Halo 2, which were hyped up to be and ended up as the defining games of last generation for their respective systems. This is probably why it sold less than the previous iterations despite the PS2 having a massive userbase at its launch.

2. The game launched during the holiday season. So even though it had low first week sales, it got a lot of sales just from being launched during that time period. I'm not sure when Week 7 took place, but that was most likely the week after Christmas, so sales might have dropped off. I can't be sure as I haven't checked the release dates.