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Kyuu 4 days ago
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Otter said:
BraLoD said:

I said nothing about the install base.

The problem is the game launching in the exact same moment Sony is making the japanese lose all interest in the PS5.

Also, Nintendo fans love platformers, so the game would have had a vastly bigger audience and exposition there being on the Switch.

Hmm, I think that's a bit of a reach in terms of making sense of Astro's soft launch. 

Right now MH Wilds for PS5 is No.2 on Amazon JP best sellers 5 months ahead of launch. For sure the price hike is bad for the playstation brand & future hardware sales, but software will sell to the 5m existing users if it's in demand. If you want to make sense of Astro's sales you'd be better off looking to the demand of other 3D platformers that were NOT made by Nintendo.

There are shockingly few success stories. Some titles that did well in the west like spyro & crash trilogy didn't make a splash in JP. Elsewhere 3rd parties are not making a dent or even trying with the genre. One game of note however is It Takes 2

It Takes 2 launched with barely 3k sales on Switch and only had a 40-60% sell through rate during its release week. It's now at 80k in Japan and still charting.

Mourning Astros sales doesn't make sense yet imo & I don't think there's any blame to attribute aside from Sony understocking week 1, but that would of just translated to digital sales. For now, it's showing legs which should be celebrated.

It would naturally do better on Switch in Japan but what game wouldn't lol. Elsewhere it reclaimed the No.1 spot in the UK in its third week.

Some games were still doing much better on Playstation than Switch weeks after launch in total sales, like Ys X and Crisis Core, this is more true when digital is factored in. But it's primarily the case with games that don't have huge potential on any platform and are associated with the Playstation brand (Ys X month 1 sales digital + physical on PS5 were bigger than PS4 and Switch versions combined IIRC).

Good short term legs for AstroBot is nothing to write home about when the initial numbers are very low. I'll be impressed if it holds for 10 weeks. I doubt digital ratio outside week 1 is that high.

It would surely have much better long term legs on Switch, but yeah it ain't doing anywhere near 500k in 3 weeks. The IP is tiny and would have needed time to be popular even on the Switch.