I see, well point remaining about different expectations regarding different entries. Insomniac for example did not expect Ratchet Rift Apart to sell more than than the 2016 game. There's always a context to take into account. 

Edit: More precisely they expected it to sell notably less 

Yeah for real when I first saw the trailer I was like this looks like the least interesting pokemon game ever.

And the past couple days I've been watching youtube reviews of people who have played through the game now, and yikes, seems the game is far worse than even the trailer made it seem.

- Graphical detail of the environment (everything except character and pokemon) is on par with about 25 years ago pretty much looks like a mediocre looking GC game and that is being generous

- art style is awful and uninspired, looks worse than literally PS2 anime-style graphics games

- various glitches though of course nothing compared to S/V

- a dead lifeless empty city with nothing to do and essentially no buildings to go into because there are no doors(!), the buildings are just rectangles wall-painted with fairly bad looking textures, it all looks on par with about the detail you'd expect from a city on the N64

- battles lost all strategy as now with "real time battles" you apparently basically just button mash your smaller attacks I guess as your bigger attacks meter fills up

- sounds like literally the worst story ever with zero bad guys

- no difficulty at all or consequences of any kind in the game

- no voice acting so all the cut scenes look awkward as hell with the mouths being animated but nothing coming out of them

- speaking of cut scenes there's just tons of these boring cut scenes that in terms of looking like real people engaging with each other look like they are from N64/PS1 era

- apparently there's like 3 boring types of quests that you just get spammed with over and over. If I remember correctly it's basically just 1) go to point A or follow so and so, 2) go fight some pokemon, 3) show me some pokemon. Just like the lamest fetch quest style of gameplay imaginable.

- a weak fall-then jump and float a bit mechanic that looks awkward as hell and also apparently nothing happens to you if you just straight up fall off a building and hit the ground

- also only takes apparently 7 minutes to run around the entire city and like 2 minutes to run across it so it's an incredible small lifeless barren city with nothing much to explore, you just run around the same empty streets and climb up to rooftops over and over again

- and just small city parks as the "wild areas" from Sw/Sh after Arceus and S/V had introduced large open free roaming natural areas for fighting pokemon

Oh yeah and while the marketing claimed this would be a vibrant city where humans and pokemon live together, it's actually quite the opposite with no real interaction at all, just dead looking NPC statues standing around not doing anything, next to their pokemon also standing like statues not doing anything.

Some of this was already pretty clear from the trailer, just the general look of empty uninteresting uninspired city, but it's truly shocking to see the levels Pokemon and Game Freak have fallen to with this game. They took the mediocre (okay, Arceus was pretty good) last few games and just said screw it let's stop messing around with mediocrity and just do the absolute lowest effort possible with Z-A.

Everything about the game makes it seem like it is some cheap knockoff mobile free-to-play game made by a few mediocre devs looking for a quick cash grab. It seems like we've finally reached the point where Game Freak and Nintendo simply don't care one bit about any level of quality or effort existing in pokemon games and they are now just cheap cash grabs to sell the next round of pokemon merchandise.

Despite all this, simply off brand loyalty and the desire to play any slop with a pokemon label slapped on it, I'm sure this will probably sell 15 million and make Nin/GF/TPC another billion dollars from the game alone off of zero effort. A really embarrassing moment for all companies and people involved and anyone paying $60/$70 for such branded slop.

Some ya'll may say that's harsh, but you have to admit it's also the truth.

Done a lot better in Japan compared to UK/Spain, relative to Arceus, as I'm sure a lot expected. 1.48m FW, compared to Arceus 1.42m.

So far physical FW compared to Arceus is 4% up for Japan, 41% down for UK and 36% down for Spain.

In terms of which system people got it on the Switch 2 version makes up 41% of sales in Japan, 40% in Spain and 51% in the UK.

Still slighlty worse than I thought. Better release window, marketing and higher userbase and barely outsold Arceus. I was expecting 1.7 million

Digital probably widens the gap along with ZA has a holiday season with DLC in the near future. Think its time for people to accept on Nintendo platforms, Europe's the outlier. NA and Japan loves Nintendo espicially the behemoths while Europe can sometimes be "so so" depending on the ip.

For reference, this launch places Z-A as the second largest of Pokémon on Switch… meaning that, yes, Z-A outperformed a mainline entry (SwSh) which launched in mid-November. Unless you had unreasonable expectations, this should’ve been a much larger launch than expected. And with an entire holiday season in Z-A’s favor, it’ll most certainly smash through Arceus’s 14mil figure.

Why should selling only 4% more than Arceus, while having a much bigger installbase, and being a crossgen release, be "much larger than expected", "unless you had unreasonable expectation."

Are you saying people should have expected it to do worse than Arceus?

Because Legends games shouldn't be expected to sale as well a new gen pokemon and Switch 1 is a dying console that can't be fully offset by a young playform. 

With how things were looking, it seemed as though Arceus would’ve benefitted a lot more from a “larger launch-weaker legs” situation due to releasing outside of the holidays. I was genuinely wondering if it’d even hit 1mil… but it appears Spain & UK are not accurate metrics for the JP market.

Sword and Shield was released in 2019, with less than half of Switch current userbase. My expectations was this was going to outsell Arceus for at least 10 to 15% units, not unreasonably at all