The way of the game

I don't give a fuck about video game sales figures. I never liked playing armchair analyst, but I did keep track of the Xbox 360's weekly sales figures from launch, up until it reached 1 million units. At that point I considered the platform "established," and the industry was likewise committed to supporting it with niche and other interesting titles so there was no fear of a Dreamcast 2-like scenario playing out.

The recent reports of Mistwalker's latest game topping the weekly sales charts in Japan raised a few interesting points, not the least of which were fans lamenting its "poor performance." I was quite surprised as to why selling over 100,000 units was considered poor, so I decided to do a little digging. A great resource for relatively recent sales data is Garaph.info, which compiles Enterbrain (Famitsu) sales data from the past few years. According to the data found in the news reports, The Last Story was Mistwalker's best game debut, and surpassed their last project, the Microsoft Game Studios published Lost Odyssey's lifetime sales during only its first week. I think that's called a success.

It should be noted before we proceed that the Garaph database is about a month out of date, with the latest entry being the last week of calendar year 2010. The sales of The Last Story would not therefore be included in the DB, and where tracked initially by Media Create, a seperate firm from the one used as the basis for these figures. The differences between the two have historically been statisitically insignificant, and even if they varied widely, the comparison would still be good enough for this blog post. I'm not advising Goldman Sachs to invest here, I'm just shooting down fanboy rants. I will also round the figures up to the nearest thousands increment, but the links I provide have all the gory details down to the single last box copy sold.

Since I consider Lost Odyssey very highly, I decided to dig a little further, and called up the data on the best selling Xbox 360 games. Here, I was surprised to see that LO was in fact the 12th best selling, out of 15 titles that moved over 100,000 units. That doesn't seem very good at all, considering that Mistwalker's orignal game, Blue Dragon was 4th, and sold a little over 200,000 units in its lifetime. Lost Odyssey was actually the worst selling RPG on the platform, and shockingly enough was surpassed by titles like Infinite Undiscovery, and The Last Remnant. The best performing RPG title on that list was also a surprise, Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope, which also sold over 200,000 units. The fact that all those games had the Square Enix logo on the box could explain this. Overall, on the 360, no title has ever came close to 300,000, with the best selling game being Grand Theft Auto IV, with approximately 210,000 units sold.

That said, The Last Story is a Wii title, so we should be looking at that platform instead. Here, the situation is much different, since Nintendo's own titles dominate sales and mind share. I kept the cut off point of at least 100,000 units sold the same, and the database returned a list of 64 titles that qualify. The top 11 best selling titles are all Nintendo published, and sold at least 1 million units, with the top seller, New Super Mario Bros. selling 4.1 million alone. The library is also more varied, so there are numerous tiles that would barely qualify as a "role playing game." I personally don't consider the likes of The Legend Of Zelda or Monster Hunter to be in the same genre, but I'll mention them here with the caveat. Monster Hunter 3 was the best selling third party title, with a hair over 1 million units. This should be considered the realistic ceiling that any other third party would shoot for in order to quantify mainstream "success" on the platform. But my personal lofty target would be Dragon Quest Swords, which is also barely an RPG, which sold roughly 400,000. The best selling "true" Wii RPG would therefore be Teles Of Symphonia Dawn Of the New World with approximately 200,000 units. The only other true entries in the genre on the platform are Tales of Graces, with 170,000, and Nintendo's own recently published Xenoblade with the "disappointing" (according to internet commentators) sales of 140,000. Personally, I'd consider Xenoblade the only true competition, since the Tales' and Dragon Quest series are already well established, and carry a brand recognition a new title can't possibly have. As a side note, the latest entry in the hardcore favorite Fire Emblem franchise also sold approximately 170,000 units in this current market. It also should be noted, that a personal favorite entry, Arc Rise Fantasia, isn't even found in the database. Whether that's due to an oversight on the part of the maintainer, or poor performance I can't say.

This brings us to the elephant in the room, and one of the loudest laments heard from its user base, the viability of the Playstation 3 market for RPG's. Using the same metrics, the database returns 66 titles that sold over 100,000 units. At the top, to no one's surprise, is Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII, with just under 2 million units. What one should take note of instead is that this is the 13th (main) entry in the series. The first original property, which has since become a series, is White Knight Chronicles. The original title sold just under 340,000. This would be what I would unquestionably label as a "success," taking the entirety of the current Japanese console role playing game market into account. Right on its heels is the PS3 port of Tales Of Vesperia, topping its 360 sales by a healthy margin of 3:2. Bandai Namco's other HD port, Tales Of Graces F is teetering at 300,000, with a surprising ratio of 2:1 over its original Wii source. This could be considered the strongest argument against a Wii exclusive RPG. The White Knight Chronicles sequel follows with almost 250,000. The next game of note on the list is the PS3 port of Xbox 360's best selling title, GTA4, with sales just shy of 200,000, placing it firmly behind its 360 twin. Then comes another personal favorite, the SEGA published Resonance Of Fate, which charted here with sales in the 180,000 range, but failed to do so on the 360, with a ratio of 6:1. Considering this was a simultaneous release, where the previous Tales' games were year-old ports, this could be taken as the best indicator of console preference among RPG gamers. Fan favorite Demon's Souls follows with almost 160,000 units, and the other side of the port debate, Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope International is right behind it. The spread here isn't huge, but the 360 original still tops the un-enhanced PS3 version. Valkyria Chronicles is the next game on the list, if I'm including marginal titles, with 140,000. And Ar Tonelico III rounds out the list with 108,000 units.

The titles that can be realistically compared to The Last Story on the PS3 are White Knight, Resonance Of Fate, and Demon's Souls, which average to about 220,000 units sold between them, which is not far off from Blue Dragon's own 360 sales or the best selling Wii RPG. Taking all this information into account, a realistic forecast for The Last Story as a new role playing game in the current Japanese market would be ~200,000 units. Considering it's already half way there, and that the average sell-through^1 post release for the top selling original RPG's is ~100,000, I can't see how The Last Story can be considered a failure. All this information is subjective, of course, since the cost of producing each game title varies. It would not surprise me if Final Fantasy XIII did not pay for its own development while something like Xenoblade did, making one a failure and the other a success from a financial standpoint. And at the end of the day, that's the only point that matters to a game developer.

Appendix A:
1 - (LTD total - 1st week sales)/3 averaged for the best selling original titles for each console; Blue Dragon, White Knight Chronicles, Xenoblade.

Appendix B:
The Last Story is in fact Mistwalker's second title published by Nintnedo, the first being the DS strategy RPG ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat. While we're on the topic, that one sold about 150,000 units, and was also decried by internet people as a "failure." I'm not about to do this whole thing over again for portables, so we'll just have to assume the punters were wrong.

From the jump (added on February 19th, 2010):
Not to beat a (stupid) dead horse any further, but an important point seems to have been omitted by almost anyone chiming in on this topic (myself included). Enterbrain, and likely Media Create, sales data doesn't include any online retailer transactions. The Gamasutra compiled, Amazon specific, best seller lists from the weeks that The Last Story has been on sale show that it was ranked among the top 5 multi platform sellers for two weeks following release, and currently sits at #5 on the latest Wii specific chart. No figures are provided, but whatever that number is, it can only serve to increase the total. I think the lesson here is that we as the public are given very limited information, and can't possibly make any accurate predictions based off of that.