| curl-6 said: I'm a big believer in Splatoon; I predicted 2 would more than double sales of the original back in early 2017 and a lot of people doubted it, but 3 doubling 2 seems very unlikely. Don't get me wrong, Splatoon 3 will be huge, but I'm not seeing any factor at this point that would boost it by over 10 million over the second game. |
I can understand your skepticism however I think you are underestimating the difference that can be achieved by just launching at the right time with the right WoM.
Switch & Splatoon 2 shipments by end of September 2017:
Switch 2017 World Wide - 7.63 million
Switch 2017 Japan - 1.78 million
Splatoon 2 World Wide - 3.61 million
Splatoon 2 Japan - 1.44 million
Splatoon 2 launched in the summer and achieved 3.61 million by the end of September 2017. It was actually severally slowed down by the size of the user-base as Nintendo's biggest online multiplayer game. It would be surprising if at launch Splatoon 3 achieves less than 3.5 million sales in Japan alone. The difference is userbase is just too big,
Userbase:
At that point physical sales per Famtisu estimates were 1.19 million, so Splatoon 2 was basically bough by 40% of Switch owners and I would go a little further and say that it drove hardware momentum by a huge amount but without adequate supply. It's the only franchise that can rival Animal Crossing in Japan, it actually increase Wii U sales for more than an year, something that no other title managed to achieve on the system.
As we can see in the end Mario Kart 8 Deluxe & Breath of the Wild ended up the best selling titles from 2017 World Wide, while Splatoon 2 was only recently overtaken by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in Japan. One of the factors that didn't help it WW was how saturated 2017 was for Nintendo, they had all these big hitters - MK8D, BotW, SMO, Splatoon 2 so their marketing had to push all of them plus other games like Arms.
Once the dust had settled they still had titles to market for 2018, so as the updates faded Splatoon 2 slowed down compared to other evergreens especially World Wide.
As discussed you are limited what you you sell at launch by the size of the user base. Potential user-base that Splatoon 3 is launching on is over 22 million in Japan and over 105 million World Wide. It will be by far the most important game launching in Japan next year, and could very well achieve over 3.5 million sales just launch day and over 5 million in it's first quarter on the market. In the meantime Nintendo has really expanded into East Asia and that's where I can see the game also becoming huge, this will help it surpass 12 million/11% attach rate World Wide in is launch quarter.
However the more important thing is the years that follow where it continues to receive on-going support, this will help its legs be far stronger than other franchises. After all it remained the best selling evergreen in 2018 in Japan when it was regularly in the news due to a new map, new mode, new gear, new updates to PvE etc.
Famitsu Switch Top 5 2018:
- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - 2.360.655
- Pokémon: Let's Go - 1.253.677
- Splatoon 2 - 1.122.324
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - 926.553
- Super Mario Party - 764.853
Now you can imagine that if it's first year in Japan is over 5 million, and the subsequent year is over 2 million, it will catch up to the likes of MK8D in the all time rankings. It will also likely benefit a huge amount from the voucher program at launch, something that didn't exist in 2017. This the reason I think that by the end of 2023 Splatoon 3 will already be past 20 million mark, how far it goes depends on the Switch's lifecycle and how long its supported.
Development Time & Marketing
The main difference is that Splatoon 2 launched at the start of the generation to drive hardware sales in Japan. However it only had 2 years of development time and a lot of core members moved onto making New Horizon. It received updates but work on major updates ended around the end of 2018.. It had some fresh ideas but the creative team had to work on a tight deadline.
Splatoon 3 has had over 5 years for creative ideation, at least four of actual development in some capacity. There has been no rush to capitalize on it, but there is no doubt that it will be a greater investment for Nintendo as a whole into the franchise. Splatoon 2 confirmed how big it was by achieving some crazy things in Japan until its support faded. I expect this title to end up with over 2 years of support and major updates, & for it to continue to be relevant on the Switch successor or Pro.
There are many things we are likely to learn in the lead up to the release, as Nintendo's marketing ramp ups. There are likely two major franchises for Nintendo next year - Splatoon 3 and the Breath of the Wild sequel. The comparison of how much marketing is focused on Splatoon 3 compared to how much marketing they could allocate in 2017 when they had a bunch of titles launching and also had to build hype for 2018 games.
Splatoon is now among the Top 5 Franchises according to Nintendo themselves - so we are talking about a massive launch for a online-focused multiplayer game. It could very well be the break-out moment for the franchise in the West if we don't see the same complaints. There was years of people saying Splatoon 2 was a port; reviews were not very good because of the staggered content approach the Splatoon team took with both the first game and the sequel. One easy way to nip any such problems in the bud is to have the biggest assortment of Single Player, PvP and PvE content ready at launch this time, this could ensure a much higher Metacritic score compared to the prior game which were low 80s.
