MGS4 outsells MGS3 by 500K in Week 1, Europe Gets Trumped By Japan!

[libellule]

MontanaHatchet said:

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.

 

some comments :

1/ if MGS3 was hyped
MGS2 was overhyped
one of the most hyped game of the industry

E3 amazing cutscene trailer with Snake on the Golden Gate ...

2/ MGS2 was, relatively, disapointing for the average gamer

so plenty of people decided to not buy MGS3 after having tried MGS2.