Quite frankly, the PS3 user base is 3x that of the Xbox, so the games are obviously going to sell better with a bigger userbase. I'm not saying they are going to sell millions, but they will certainly do better. WKCs main selling point is that it is basically the only jRPG on the PS3 and loads of people like Level 5. I think it certainly has a good change of selling better than LO, though I had thought it had sold closer to 400k in Japan, whereas it is now at 350k

Even if they didnt fund it, the engine is up and running, what other way to do than on a HD system that its easiest to work on?

But no, tri-Ace confirmed MS funded it, the engine used for IU was used again in SO4. It was a good will gesture to go 360 first, make the most then port.

You're right, they haven't, but both have sold better than ToV worldwide (which is a shame really, ToV was amazing).

Only in the West? That's not what the thread was about.

The worldwide figures were posted and were then discussed. I thought the new IPs sold well but the already established franchises sold very poorly.

SO3 -> SO4 - 1.26m -> 0.57m

and ToS -> ToA -> ToV - 1.12m (GC) -> 0.57m (America only) ->  0.36m

I mean, we can make many hypotheses as to why they haven't sold up to snuff when compare to previous iterations, but the fact is that they grossly undersold when compared to their most recent iterations.

New IPs, I would think have met or, sometimes even, passed expectations but it's hard to be convinced of the same thing with the franchise games.

^^ And the fact is, the PS3 or the 360 are NOWHERE near as successful as the PS2. That ever occur?

Why do people love to point out how much something has sold in comparison to its predecessor? Situations as well as conditions change and thats whats happened. SE and tri-Ace arent stupid, they are expecting the game to sell way below the PSone/PS2 games but at the same time they also have a target number they need to reach to break even and then make profit.

Of course it has. That isn't the sole issue here, I was responding to a comment on marketing and reviews.  But as I mentioned earlier, new IPs, typically, sold very much on par with those on the PS2, while franchise games sold much less than even the new IPs.

Hell, I even used ToS on Gamecube as one of the examples... Are the 360 and PS3 nowhere near as popular as the GC?

Obviously there are several contributing factors, but regardless, when a game (ToV) from an established franchise sells less than the majority of new IPs on the same system, it simply did not sell well. I don't understand what is so difficult to accept here. (edit: It seems simulacrum had already alluded to this... and yes, Tales has had previous success outside of Japan, both ToA and ToS did well in the West)

JRPG have just started finding a new home on the 360, most people interested in them had already bought a PS3 before the 360 got so many of them and ofcourse the biggest one of them all FF13. But I wouldn't say that the xbox wasnt known for RPG, in my book it has always been the console for WRPG. Sony and Nintendo were never interested in them, it was Microsoft that brought The Elder Scrolls to consoles, that suppored Fable and helped Bioware introduce their RPGs to the console. That has paid off for them since Oblivion, Fable 2 and Mass Effect are all million sellers on 360. WRPG makers who normally only made for the PC are therefor now making a 360 version aswell, for example Divinity 2 and Risen. Microsoft is just repeating the same trick with JRPG now, they've showed that fans of these games can expect more then enough titles so next gen it's likely that more gamers will buy a xbox for this reason.

TotA actually sold pretty poorly in the West.  It only sold 120K here.

My mistake... I read 570k as sold in America. Which was ridiculous really, as I had already mentioned its sales as Japan only earlier. Thanks for pointing that out.

By the way, where did you find that 120k figure? I can't seem to find it anywhere?

Comparing these to some of the JRPG sales on PS2 which has huge attach rate and large number of consoles out there sold to consumers I'd say they are good. 500 thousand+ sales on The Last Remnant, Star Ocean:TLH, Blue Dragon and Infinite Undiscovery is about even with some of the better PS2 JRPG titles without Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest in the name. Then you have Lost Odyssey which nerly reached a million in sales and is a brand new ip. I hardly call the JRPG sales on X360 worse or bad.

Well I don't know about you but I've been able to enjoy nearly every JRPG I've played thus far on both PS3 and X360. I hardly think they need to drastically rethink anything however innovation is always beneficial to a point.