Wii releases from prominent publishers selling poorly at day one
Looking at first day sales of high profile games like Square Enix‘ Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon: Labyrinth of Forgotten Time and Sega‘s NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, the Nintendo Wii doesn’t seem to be doing well in terms of pushing software off shelves. Figures and details are at the full article.
The white hot Nintendo Wii may be selling like hotcakes, but games made for the console don’t come close. Or at least, recent first day sales numbers show even high profile titles like Square Enix‘ Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon: Labyrinth of Forgotten Time and Sega‘s NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams don’t experience stellar launch days.
Here are some of recently released games and copies sold at launch from sinobi’s blog via Cubed3:
- Chocobo‘s Mysterious Dungeon: Labyrinth of Forgotten Time (Wii, Square Enix) – 30,000 (30% sell through of initial stock)
- NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (Wii, Sega) – 7,000 (10% sell through)
- Soul Calibur Legends (Wii, Bandai Namco) – 5,000 (10% sell through)
- We Love Golf (Wii, Capcom) – 4,000 (10% sell through)
- Shikigami no Shiro III (Wii, Arc System Works) – 500
For a game closely knit to the popular Final Fantasy franchise, the dungeon crawler Chocobo’s Dungeon: Labyrinth of Forgotten Time getting 30,000 copies off shelves at launch in Japan doesn’t sound too good. Sega’s revival of a classic, NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, also performed poorly on day one despite being sought after by its fans.
Aside from the two highly anticipated releases, other Wii titles also weren’t able to have spectacular launches to speak of. Even Grasshopper Manufacture‘s No More Heroes didn’t receive much attention from the Japanese audience, and Suda51’s presence couldn’t make customers come when the game launched.
According to previous reports, Japanese developers are starting to worry about profitability of developing games for the Wii. While first party titles are often successful on Nintendo’s console, most third party entries are hit or miss. Looks like time will tell if sales will pickup for these recent releases, or end up short of selling through.