From Y-koron via shinobi:

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Preorders of Oblivion (360) is good. It may be possible to sell at first-week more than trusty bell (Shinobi)

Thats why it matters. Oblivion has actually been real high on the amazon charts. It was at #22 overall before Forza 2 came out, and has been #3 on the X360 charts for awhile.

I am very suprised preorders are that high - maybe there could be 80 or 90k for it's first week shipment.

IMO, I figured that OB would sell 20k LTD over it's entire run, but with this info, it could get 70-100k.

Higher than trusty bell? Will the streams cross? Lol.

Who knows. IMO, it does sound like retailers are anticipating good demand for the game. I wonder what that means - are gamers actually wanting to buy it, or are stores just anticipating that they are going to buy it?

If thats true, retailer pre-orders could be around 75-85k. That'd be absolutely huge. Oblivion deserves it too. Best part is, maybe it could start giving WRPGs some sort of prominence in Japan - and MS would do very well in that market with games like Two Worlds, Mass Effect and others coming out soon.

i see Oblivion selling 70k in its lifetime

I think 75,000 - 100,000 is the magic number.

wow, i guess oblivion could do well.

if 360 games can reach some kind of critical mass, with blue dragon, trusty bell, oblivion, it could challenge ps3's position in japan!

but i estimate you need to reach 10 solid games like trusty bell for the 360 to get there, the inflection point. which is... somewhat far off.

I don't think it will beat Trusty Bell in neither first week or lifetime sales.
Japanese simply don't play western games. Its just not their cup of tea. Look at the top sellers for 360 in Japan.
Maybe if the graphics were anime-style sales will see a boost.

Its a real shame that a grand title like Oblivion won't even be recognized by the majority there.

Yet pre-orders are higher for Oblivion than Trusty Bell.

Western games don't sell as well in Japan as the West, we all know that. However, that doesn't prevent them from atleast selling at all.

A few good examples would be Halo 1/2, Resistance, and GTA:SA.

Halo 1/2 ended up selling around 70-80k units each, on a system that only sold 480k h/w units LTD. That's not a real bad number, IMO.

R:FoM sold 126,000+ units thus far. Very good for a strongly Western FPS for the PS3 launch. Honestly, this number is excellent, considering the PS3 userbase. More than 10% of the PS3 owners right now have a copy of this game.

GTA:SA hassold 372,000+ units. This pales in comparison to the Western numbers, but it's a Z-Rated game. It's blacklisted beyond belief. GTA3 also did 300k+. Very very good for games that always get moved to the back of the stores and have no displays.

Gears of War is charging to the 70k mark in Japan as well. Not incredibly awesome, but again, considering the userbase, it's good. In another world, if the 360 was #1 in Japan, if the tier ratios were the same, the Western games would be doing incredibly well.

Eventually, it just comes down to userbase: The 360 certainly has the most Western games in Japan, but they do poorly not because of the fact they're western, but because they're on a console with such abysmal hardware sales.

With more 360 western fare such as Oblivion, Halo 3 and Mass Effect dropping this year, we could see one, or even all, of those titles break the 100k barrier in Japan - an impressive feat for a system that might have only 650k~700k h/w units sold by the end of the year.

Just give it time before a Western dev puts a major franchise on the Wii, or a better-selling PS3. Games like Metal Gear, RE:4 are Western-centric, but sell well, so it's really not the style, it's probably the preception and translation, and hype. Everyone thinks that Western games don't sell so they aren't promoted. Really, this is only true with video games. American music artists regularly do well in Japan. There's an audience for Western games in Japan, I just don't think many people have taken the time to deal with translations, and attempting to really cater to the Japanese with a western game.

I do, however feel that one of those 3 aforementioned 360 games should do very very well for it's userbase. What if Oblivion outsold the US's PS3 version (150k)? What if Mass Effect sold 150k? What if Halo 3 sold 150k? To me, those numbers would be phenominal. Look at the 360 market in Japan. Games like Rainbow Six:Vegas have certainly improved on other TPS games in Japan as of recent. GRAW 1 has sold maybe 13k. RSV is at twice that number in Japan, and climbing.

Assuming the Japanese keep up with video gaming news, it wouldnt be surprising if the gamers knew how well Oblivion scored across the English market thus making it a anticipated game. Being that it is an RPGish game (yes saying its rpg makes me itch a bit), it may attract more people than we think but honestly... I think they should have done this with Morrowind not Oblivion back on the original XBox if they wanted to build some kind of market there. Oblivion without all the hype and media brown-nosing will not score as well on a level playing field. I would say 100k sales only because Japan might be curious to see what the fuss was all about.

http://www.amazon.jp/gp/bestsellers/videogames/ref=pd_ts_vg_nav/249-2362655-6566704?pf_rd_m=AN1VRQENFRJN5&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=1CZWN36Q94S3HPA5WBQD&pf_rd_t=2101&pf_rd_p=50133006&pf_rd_i=home

I know it doesn't very much but Oblivion is know on the 6th place in bestsellers on amazon Japan.
It's an indication about how popular the game is we're now 1 month before it's release in Japan.
Could Oblivion sell more than Everybody's Golf 5?