Octopath Traveler ships 1 million units (Digital included)

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routsounmanman said:

 

As a business decision is stupid to lock yourself to a 20 million user base, and that why nobody is really doing it, unless it's a low budget project, that's targeting 1-2 million sales. imagine a ambitious developer lets lock out over 200 million users with PC gaming rigs included, and choose to go exclusive on the weakest hardware, which is really gonna limit what they want to do.    

On that I kindly agree. It's not worth to develop AAA for the Switch alone, unless they're franchises guaranteed to sell incredibly well (MH, FF, etc). Mid tier titles would work best. The issue though, is that we're not even seeing THAT.

For example, many third party franchises which do not require a huge budget could sell 1-3m on the Switch, yet third parties keep ignoring the platform, even today. Atlus with Persona, Capcom with many of their franchises, Namco Bandai (Ni no kuni - hello?), Konami with Castlevania and many more.

The problem is also that the smaller and mid-tier titles (or A and AA, if you prefer) are slowly disappearing. The big publishers don't need them anymore to pad out their releases and financial quarters due to DLC and Microtransactions filling up this role. How many mid-tier titles are still getting released by western publishers? Ubisoft may still have some, but EA, Activision and the like don't anymore, really. Just try and name 10 of these games released by big publishers in the last 3 years.