Apparently this game has undersold and underdelivered on every market it's been launched in, despite having quite a lot of advertisement behind it (not FIFA levels of publicity, but I've seen it had some push behind it). It sold around 2.1k copies at launch in Japan (Balan Wonderworld Debuted At Under 2,100 Copies In Japan (thegamer.com)), which is abysmal for a title backed by a big studio, hell, even indies can make bigger numbers. The only game that sold worse in Japan at launch that I remember is Codename STEAM, and that at least was platform exclusive. Balan Wonderworld is a multiplat. How did this happen?

The demo happened...

It got what it deserved.

Bad game design.... the 1 buttom approach, and the backwards story telling (which seem meaningless) and the bad platform design...

Its just a bad game.

^ this too.

Normally if you make a horrible game, but market it right, you can fool enough people.
Demo's cut through all the BS, you try the demo and you know its a bad game = less sales.

It honestly looks pretty ugly for it's style. I've only ever seen a few clips of it to boot, and well, it's SE, and SE want £50 for it, so fat chance of me ever buying it.

Also people have been voicing their concerns about the regional prices in their areas on Steam, so yeah...not at all surprised why it's sold like shit, it got what it deserved.

SE needs to learn it's prices better tbh, because just charging sodding $50-60 for everything they churn out is a shit practice (they also still haven't fixed Star Ocean on PC, as well as DQ builders 2).

Launching it at a different price wouldn't have helped much, if at all. It might garner more sales, but launching at a lower price also changes the profit margins, so it might actually make less money that way. At this point, the people who are spending $50-$60 for Balan are probably hardcore YujiNakaists, and that wouldn't change that much if it was a $40 game (maybe at $30 you'll get a couple of meme purchases, but only a few still). 

The better solution is to just .... make a better game. 

The price isn't even the main issue, the lack of quality is. The price makes it all just worse.

Also, I wonder if the game managed to sell 100k units WW.

Having played the demo (well, as much of it as I could stomach) I'm not surprised it bombed. It's one of the most poorly designed games I've tried in a very long time. That Squeenix actually decided to ship this mess is a bloody mystery.

- 27 on Switch Metacritic
- 39 on Series X Metacritic
- 46 on PS4 Metacritic
- 48 on PC Metacritic

Do I need to tell more ?

it has 311 players on TA, which is shockingly low but I'm not surprised. Anyone that was slightly interested and tried the demo likely got turned off, I know I did.