Is not awfull dude, not even close. The game is close to 450 FW WW and showing big legs already.

The witcher 3 sold 270k on XBO being the third of the saga, being hyped for 2 years with crazy pre-orders since the last year, and that data is from 11 days.

Splatoon without any kind of hype until 2 weeks before the release has managed to sell half of that in 2 days being a whole new IP, on a console with only the 60% of the userbase that XBO has.

Not even close from being awfull, nor mediocre.

First of all, we don't know their sales expectations for this game. So we cannot assume that the expectations placed on most games apply to this one. I'll fill you in on something I heard from the Giant bombcast concerning massive sales projections.

Games can be considered "failures" even if they go past breaking even. Why is this? Big publishers need their "hits" to do well enough to cover potential "misses". So developers not only have to develop a game that does well for them, it also has to do well enough to cover for other developers within the same company whose performance could hurt the publisher. Most major game publishers are held to this standard, but I don't think Nintendo is.

Even if this game was (which I highly doubt), we don't know the development costs and sales expectations for Splatoon. We only have an idea of how much they're spending on marketing and no key data associated with development costs. Wait until we have more evidence before declaring it a failure...

Personally, I think it has outperformed even Nintendo's expectation.

It was never going to be huge in the West but it has done well regardless even at a much higher price and it did really well in Japan and even had a great second week and helped the hardware move as well.

Overall, I think Nintendo are happy, and they should be.

Are we twisting reality to fit our arguments now?

Sorry? the argument "Splatoon has no hype outside this forums" has been a classic in VGC (and Neogaf) all this time.

Now I´m changing reality, ME?

Pre-orders on Japan didn´t go crazy until the testfire, that was the 8/9 of May, so 2/3 weeks before release.

I´m not twisting anything.

I'm purely talking about US numbers here. The game has done well in Japan for sure and I'll happily admit it exceeded my expectations in the East. For the launch The US numbers are nothing special. I don't think Nintendo's disappointed, but I think that's more of case of very low expectations for everything they release on WiiU nowadays. Now it can always leg out and pull some solid numbers over time but as of now I don't see anything worth celebrating for the NPD. Especially when, very worringly, the game had no effect on hardware.

Nintendo fans have been hyping this game up since it was revealed, saying that there was no hype for this until 2 weeks before release is completely rewriting history. The Splatoon reveal trailer has almost 1.8 million clicks on Youtube, not a lot of Nintendo videos get to that range, I don't care what has been "classic in VGC and Gaf", it is completely false that there was no hype for the game prior to 2 weeks before release.

the way some of you change the arguments with time is just... I leave it there.

I don´t want to argue with you to be honest, Splatoon had a huge hype everywhere since the last year, OK, you win.

Thing is, I think a game like Splatoon is built more for a Western audience than an Eastern one. It's a competitive, multiplayer-centric, third person shooter. This isn't the sort of thing Japan usually goes crazy over. Which is why I find it surprising it's doing so much better in Japan than the US. Sales are sales regardless but it kind of flipped my expectations.

US is obsessed with military shooters. Splatoon in a lot of ways is a shooter but made specifically for Japanese tastes first. The main hub area is basically like a stylized version of Shibuya (Tokyo).