An online-focused Wii game that's not doing as well as expected? And Wii has such great online integration!
I'm surprised it's selling at all. If it weren't for the DQ name, it would've sold like 98 copies lifetime.

I think this has far more to do with it being a MMO than anything else ...

Since (before) World of Warcraft was released, many publishers saw the massive revenue potential of having 1+ million users paying $10/month to play a game (often for years) and have released multiple MMO games. The vast majority of these games have struggled to find a dedicated audience that can cover the infastructure costs.

IMO the biggest probem most of these games have is they have done little to take advantage of the fact that people are playing a game with thousands of other people at the same time; so what you're left with as a very long and repetitive single player game in a world that is as interactive and dynamic as a 15 year old game.

that works too XD

Well we know it's coming out for WiiU next, but I wonder if there's a chance this will go to PS3 now in an attempt to make this into a profitable venture.

I'm guessing this means that subscription rates aren't that high, rather than the sales of the actual game itself aren't that high. We've got DQX at 630k sold, which is a respectable number for Japan alone imo.

Games like this get their money back through continued subscriptions more than anything else. I'm sure - if the game hasn't already returned its development costs - then it will do swiftly, and continue to make money on top of that. But I'd guess Square-Enix had unrealistic expectations and likely expected this to be a cash cow they could milk for years to come. Which they probably still can, but not with quite the success they'd have been initially hoping for.

Seems unlikely that the Wii-U version will give it too much of a boost either. I'm sure some people will be holding out for that version. But I bet Squeenix weren't hoping to be pegged as the only big Q1 release in Japan, so it again - probably won't provide the boost they were hoping.

Missed opportunity. Just developing another Dragon Quest mainline game would surely have been better, while they continued to work out how & when to deliver a Dragon Quest MMO.

Maybe it's just bad as an MMO? Who's played it at all?

That's still an incredibly ignorant statement though. You're implying no one wanted it at all. When over the years hundreds of thousands of people have played their MMOs.

Keeping Dragon Quest X on console (a declining one and one with a slow start) is probably one of the worst decisions that SE could have made with the game. What made FFXI so successful is the abundance of platforms that the game was available on coupled with a void the game was filling (Japanese centric JRPG MMO).

Dragon Quest X should have been multiplat from the start with the main platform PC

Didn't help that the game released on the most unfriendly online platform out there. I'm sure it'll make them money in the end, but there's not a whole lot of positive momentum behind this one. The items BaldrSkies posted are just more items to think that the game has a real negative perception right now.

Explain unfriendly online platform. As far as I understood it, it was up to the devs to make it as good as they wanted. I.e. it was in how powerful the servers were and the in/outgoing connection was.