If Demon's Soul sold 23k with a 30% shipment sellthrough, it would be called a bomb. Who cares about the percentage, a bomb is a bomb. This game did as bad as expected pretty much, nothing has really changed.

Damn, Demon's Soul didn't do good.

Is a western version locked already or were they waiting on Japanese numbers to decide?

Well you can look at the sales of Demon's Soul two ways,

"80% sellthrough, that's really good!"

or

"who cares if it's 80% sellthrough? It's still only 23,000"

So everyone take their pick!

Also, I wouldn't say DS is aimed "squarely at Japanese gamers". If I first saw a video of the game with no prior info on it, I would definitely guess it was made by a Western Developer.

My demon soul predictions were right, Another Code though is off. I thought since adventure games are popular in Japan on DS it could work on the Wii, but I guess the current bad situation of the Wii in Japan didn´t let the game sell.

I don´t understand how some people expect Demon Soul´s to sell 100k first week. Although it´s made by japanese, it actually is a WRPG in design, feel and gameplay. So I classify it under WRPGs, not JRPGs.

Wow... so very few copies of Demon's Souls shipped....

you think this game is eternal sonata type appeal oh lordie me please tell me you were just trying to make your your arguement sound better and you dont really believe demons soul is comparable to eternal sonata. also didnt ninja blade get higher review scores? no matter how you want to spin this demons soul doesnt have as much japanese appeal as youd like it to have

It's a f*cking RPG of course it has more sales than a Hack'n'Slash on a console with 1/3 the userbase.

Breaking 7k sales on a system with 2.85 million owners IS expected. No matter if a RPG is unknown, extremly westernized or even bad.

@ Aj_habfan )

there is a clear difference between 23k 30% sellthrough and 23k 80% sellthrough - it's availability

if a game has that much sellthrough it means it's mostlikely sold out in most places and can't be bought more even if there is demand, while at 30% it's available everywhere and a sign, that the demand is more than satisfied.

In other words because it has a high sellthrough we can asume it will do quite good the following days/weeks (if retailers order/get new shipments), while a low sellthrough means the demand is stilled and there will be less following sales.

@ Barozi )

take a deep breath and calm down

(I hope)no one wants to say Ninja Blade was bad only because it sold badly (as expected I guess? - well, I personally expected it to do a little bit better though) and in turn you don't have to try to talk down Demons Soul's merits of selling relatively well by making it seem like RPGs always sell bucketloads - there are many (J)RPGs even on the DS (the best sold system ever in Japan), that didn't even get close to 7k sales

There's a difference between 80% sellthrough and 30% sellthrough, of course 23k is not good, but it's from almost 30k available, a lot of stores sold out and left people without their copy, that means the game could have sold more if the shipment was higher... 23k with a shipment of 77k (30%) is different, because that means the game has low demand... This 2 points are important to the future sales of the game...

The game met my shipment and sales expectations though... The hype was not there, From Software has almost a mute reputation, and it didn't receive much advertising...

That is so not true.  Japanese retailers completely screwed up for this one.  They underestimated the demand of this game and ordered too few copies for sale.

Honestly, with so little information about this game before launch, and the art style of this game is so westernized, who would have thought that this game could be decent and Japanese core gamers totally buying into it.