| okr said: The Conduit sold 420.000 Monster Hunter Tri sold 440.000 so far in the west. Flop? No. Success? No. Mild disappointment? Probably. |
Well not a bad comparison but it doesn't take into account all factors. First and foremost, problems you get with comparing 2 months to lifetime is price differences. Monster Hunter Tri in those first 2 months has been $50 and $60. Both Conduit and Madworld have fluctuated in price, and both down to $20 I believe (Conduit might still be at $30). So revenue wise, Monster Hunter Tri is probably a hell of a lot more than those.
Second, part of the marketing was split between Capcom and Nintendo. If we are starting to talk about those budgets specific to the developer, then we are getting on a very hazy part because we don't know how the splits went. But indeed, MHT had a very large marketing production but considering the western release was nothing but online components and "port" the development time and budget probably wasn't too high. Unless of course we want to start factoring in the Japanese side of this were obviously numbers will change quite significantly.
Finally, we aren't entirely sure about how much it has actually shipped compared to those sales. Give or take the marketing and hype, the shipments could be well past that of the actual sales as is the usual case for titles like that. Some of the more front-loaded games will sale a million the first week and have an actual shipment of 2-2.5 million. I think if we take that range and retailer perceptions of the Wii, then the shipments of this game could be at about 750k, but that is purely a guesstimate. The other two titles, however, are further along in their lifecycle and obviously sales are going to be closer to shipments as they probably aren't actively shipped (by most of the smaller and mid-range retailers at least). If they are shipped the are small and controlled. It wouldn't be surprising if actual shipments for Conduit and Madworld are within 50k-100 of the actual sales.
I think when we look at it this way with a few more logical variables, we can get a better idea of things. But of course, with no physical numbers, it would just be making comparative judgments so doesn't get us too far. But I think just by comparison, we can see that MHT has done far better on the market than the others. The real kicker in this was that it didn't have the full development process as the others as it had already released in Japan, and unless we count in the Japanese sales, then it really wouldn't be fair to count Japanese development budgets.
Personally, I don't think any is a failure whatsoever or a flop, but I wouldn't say any are huge successes as a business would want it. But shipment wise, Capcom has definitely hit their expectations and rather quickly so they'll be happy.









We'll just have to agree to disagree completely. I like your wording, "gamers like me", as opposed to Wii players who I guess are not gamers (?) (I saw that in some other post of yours), and that Wii fans have to "come out from hiding".