Aielyn said:
Yakuzaice said:
Monster Hunter Tri isn't really an mmo for the most part, and it didn't sell like it did due to it's mmo-ish features. Although for what it's worth, I don't believe DQX's system is massively different. Of course the difference is the Monster Hunter games gained their popularity on the back of multiplayer. I just don't see how it is logical that an 8 month old game releasing on a console with less than a tenth of the install base will sell more than the original. The closest comparison I can think of are sports games. Generally new consoles get a late release, they have mass appeal, and they generally are superior in some ways (though EA tends to make awful next gen versions for their series). In that case, sports games don't usually outsell the version on the established console. What kind of time frame do you expect a million sales? Because by the end April NSMBU will likely be under 600k. That's an exclusive, available at launch, and from a series that has done up to 6.5 million in Japan. While I don't think comgnet is necessarily a good barometer for sales, it doesn't seem that the Wii U version of DQX is causing a stir there. The barrier to enter the charts is only 35 and it is absent. DQX Wii ended with 318 (for the USB bundle, an additional 27 for the base game) and was at 132 31 days before release. It reached 38 points when there were still 81 days left to release. That's a very sizable gap when you expect the Wii U release to perform better.
It wasn't only Just Dance though. You also expected 50k for Fifa and Skylanders, and at least 10k for titles like Tank Tank Tank. This was after the first week in Europe, so I don't think anything changed in terms of game releases between then and the end of the year that would have affected sales. Even the best selling game, Nintendo Land, only managed 68,477. When you scale it back to compensate for VGC overtracking the Wii U it is only 56,218. Of course none of this has any bearing on future sales, but I think it shows your expectations for the Wii U are very unrealistic. Even after knowing those three games sold less than 1,600 week 1 you expected them to sell another 49k/99k in the next four weeks.
Which then brings us to your last point, regarding Nintendo's estimate. The Wii U will probably be at ~260k for the year at week 4. Over half of that came in the first week, and part of that week actually fell in last year's quarter. We know that the Wii U was overtracked by ~77k between Japan, the US, and Nintendo's definition of Europe. Most of that was in the US. That brings known sell through to 1.942 million. If we are generous and assume none of the other areas were overtracked by VGC that means total sell through is probably 2.168 million. That leaves 892k on the shelves at the start of this quarter, and they want to ship another 940k. After 4 weeks there are still ~632k in the supply chain with 9 weeks to go. Just to clear through that and have the other 940k they want to ship on shelves, they will need to start selling 70k a week each week for the rest of the quarter. Since Rayman is the only notable game between now and mid march that seems unlikely. There are only 5 weeks including the week Rayman releases. If sales don't improve between now and Rayman, they will need to sell 98.4k per week in those 5 weeks. Even if they manage that, they will have to convince retailers to take another 1 million in inventory by the end of March. A tough prospect when as you mentioned some retailers are already having to discount the Wii U, particularly in Europe.
Of course that is looking at a worldwide perspective. It is a little different if you break it down by region. Depending on what percentage of "Other" Europe is, they might not see any shipments to the region in the fourth quarter. There were 900k shipped compared to 425k sold. Unless sales outside of Europe are very high, it seems unlikely they will even sell through the Q3 shipment by the end of Q4. In Japan they are probably another 6 weeks (10 total) from selling through the initial shipment. In comparison, the 3DS took 8 weeks of its second quarter in Japan to sell its initial shipment, and had a higher rate of weekly sale. It shipped only 210k in Japan in its second quarter on sale, and 710k WW. So, optimistically we can expect a 200k shipment in Japan and we've deduced the European shipment will likely be negligable. That leaves us with the Americas. If we assume the US is about 90% of the Americas, then there are ~330k left on shelves. January sales look to be less than 70k in the US so less than 78k for the Americas. Unless sales improve by leaps and bounds, this won't be enough to ship an additional 740k to meet their forecast.
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First thing to note is that my 1 million comment was intended in terms of total ownership of the game across the two platforms. Why "total ownership"? Because there's a deal that lets you upgrade from Wii to Wii U version for half price - I expect some of the owners of the Wii version to upgrade. A realistic number in terms of early sales (say, by midyear) is, say, 300-400k. As for the NSMB U 600k by April - that assumes that nothing improves its sales numbers in the next three months; since we're talking about the kind of game that can boost sales numbers, and NSMB U is likely to be bought by the majority of people who buy a Wii U early on, this assumption doesn't hold water. An interesting thing to note is that, in Japan, so far, the tie ratio for the Wii U isn't far above 1; the Wii, in the same time period, had a tie ratio of over 2. I'd say that this suggests that there's something that Japanese Wii U owners are waiting for.
My predictions regarding Fifa were based on the assumption that EA were putting real effort into the Wii U. Turns out that that assumption was entirely wrong. I think it speaks volumes that Fifa is selling better in the US than in Europe, which is almost unprecedented for the series (there was one spinoff Fifa title for the PS2 that I saw when looking through the list). This, while Fifa in America is outperforming Madden (which EA didn't even bother releasing in Europe, although all the other versions were) - how can you explain this, other than to say that clearly EA aren't doing their job with their own software, especially in Europe? Mind you, EA couldn't even be bothered to port their new physics engine over to the Wii U versions, so I'm not surprised, in the end, that fans aren't buying it... especially after EA screwed fans over recently by releasing a literal roster-update version of Fifa for Wii last year (or was it this year?).
Skylanders, we can't trust the data for, because it's missing week 1 data in all of europe, and week 2 data in Germany and France. While I don't think it'll be up around 50k, it'll be higher than it currently looks. But having said that, I do admit that I overestimated the numbers that would be done. I should have looked into the sorts of numbers it had been getting in the past in the UK - I just assumed proportional numbers, but the original barely made 100k in UK on the Wii, despite doing 1 million in Europe in general. I had been expecting the series to be stronger in the UK than it was.
As you mention, in the first four weeks of 2013, the Wii U will have sold around 260k. This, without a single notable release (barely a release at all, actually). To get the shipments up to 4 million, it likely only needs about 800k more sold through, which, in my opinion, is certainly achievable, when you factor in three things - lower prices bring more sales (and if the price is being dropped by more in Europe, it's probably because they've given the system a much bigger margin for retailers in Europe - the price there is excessively inflated, the equivalent of something like US$470 for the premium pack (for comparison, the PS3 500GB goes for the equivalent of US$360)).
Of course, as I've said before, sales are primarily driven by games. There are two notable exclusives being released for the Wii U in the next two months. Beyond games, advertising has a significant impact - do you really think Nintendo isn't already planning their second wave of advertising - and then price. And Nintendo needn't give price cuts in order to entice purchase through price - bundles are often another approach.
In short, the only way to reasonably assume that current sales numbers are going to be representative of ongoing sales numbers is if you assume that Nintendo does nothing over the next three months. Given Iwata's comments about the importance of meeting targets in the current quarter, I'd assume that means Nintendo has plans.
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