Fragile:
Hoped more, feared a lot less.

im not surprised at fragiles numbers i had a feeling it would do bad

There is, of course, a possibility for the situation involving Wii changing over the year, if not for this game but at least for the system and its reputation in total.

i actually expected less from fragile and way more for haruhi

During the devlopement process it surely will be obvious at some point how much the game is going to sell but there surely are a lot of games that the developers overestimate. When you start development you should think about the number of units you want your game to sell. If you want it to sell really well you will give it a higher budget. What I mean is the developers know about the rough sales figures some months prior to release but only when it's too late to change the concept of the game.

I don't say Namco was dissapointed by the numbers they surely did know it wouldn't sell a quadrillion copies at launch. But it is still possible they started with higher expectations.

but I don't want to discuss Fragile sales (I hope the game sells well) I'm just confused by the huge amount of people who claim a game is a success when it sells 50% of its shipment on day one. If you originally expected the first shipment to be 250k copies (and I mean one year prior to release because that's what matters) and the shipment is only 100k in the end you surely will be dissapointed even if the game sells 80% of its shipment on day one.

If developers really knew what the shipment numbers would be at launch there wouldn't be a single developer going bankrupt, right? You don't start developing a game with the thought: "Oh well this game is gonna make us one million dollars so we'll give it a budget of 2 million".

So yeah maybe Namco knew how big the first shipment would be at some point but that doesn't mean it was their plan to sell 20k copies on day one. If their budget was 2 million dollars they surely wouldn't be pleased with 20k units even if it was 50% of the shipment. You don't know for sure how much a game will sell when you give it a certain budget and that's what matters.

Boring numbers. WKC is still the champ when it comes to console RPGs in Japan.

How can all these people base a games' sales on the Wii after just 1 day? It has been proven on this site again and again that Wii games sell over time. Decisions on whether the game was a bomb should be taken after a few weeks at least. 16k first day seems ok. It could have been a lot worse. Not saying it's brilliant but seems ok.

peachbuggy, its not good. 16k is just a low number and as the past has shown us if you look at games I listed in my previous post, you will see none of them had any kind of legs. What all of them had in common is that they were core games.

Core games never have legs in Japan, most of their sales come from the first week, after that the game sells a minuscule amount in comparison for 3 - 4 weeks and then dies off. In some cases, first week sales are more than 80% of total sales.

People who are interested in the games buy them fast, hence the inexistant legs. I really dont see how Namco will be able to recoup costs with such low numbers, unless they release it in other territories and advertise it enough to sell. I believe part of the problem is that no company is willing to advertise their Wii games, and that hurts the sales a lot.

Im wondering how well will FFCC:EoT and Trace Memory will sell. I'm not expecting much either, probably 20k and 60k lifetime respectively.

 I agree.  I thought this game would not go aywhere nearly that number, but no one knows for sure if it will be a success or not, nor do we know of any overseas release (I'm sure that will help boost its popularity), but I think it's too soon to say if it failed or not.  I'm taking this with a grain of salt and waiting for the official charts.  Not that I'm expecting it to be any higher than 24K or even close to 30K, but we only have several days to go.  I'll wait to see if it improves or not before declaring otherwise.

Eh? This one sold more:

http://vgchartz.com/games/game.php?id=7009&region=Japan

But I know many people'll say "It's not a proper RPG, etc. etc."