Video game sales thread

[Potato]

Switch sold another 93,210 in Japan last week. Increase of +10k over last year.

There's no stopping the switch/totk train in Japan.

Pikmin 4 sold another 78,838 for a ltd total of 596,388. Going to easily be the best selling Pikmin game in Japan and WW

[Nintex]

I wonder how TOTK is doing in the west, I haven't seen an update on sales and not that much coverage post launch.

Guess those playing it belong to either one of these groups  
- Folks that rushed through it in a week or 2 and have moved on to something else
- People like me, too busy with other things playing it casually over a longer period of time
- New Switch owners, probably picking up both BOTW and TOTK, still playing BOTW at this point

[Nintex]

Nintendo is now officially the richest company in Japan  

[Potato]

By what metric?

Profit? Cash reserves? Market capitalisation?

[Nintex]

By what metric?

Profit? Cash reserves? Market capitalisation?

Cash - debt

Nintendo:
$11 billion / 0 debt

[Potato]

Pretty bad metric of success.

[Nintex]

1 Helldivers 2 (Sony)
2 EA Sports FC 24 (EA)
3 Dragon's Dogma 2 (Capcom)
4 WWE 2K24 (2K Games)
5 Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (Square Enix)
6 Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege (Ubisoft)
7 Command & Conquer: Generals (EA)
8 Grand Theft Auto 5 (Rockstar)
9 Hogwarts Legacy (Warner Bros)
10 Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (EA)

What year is it . gif

[Potato]

Sony just dropped it's hardware forecast again. 

https://www.installbaseforum.com/forums/threads/sony-q3-fy3-2024-financial-results-oct-dec-2023-gn-s-sales-up-by-16-yoy-oi-down-by-26-ps5-hw-at-8-2m-sw-at-89-7m-new-forecast-sm2-at-10m.2418

Demand is definitely on the downward slope and with no system selling games coming anytime soon, that trend will continue.

Anecdotally, PS5 hardware has been seeing some significant discounting at retail here.

[Nintex]

They're going to cheat the numbers by releasing the PS5 Pro @ $699 or $799 or whatever, which the Sony Ponies will pick up at any price just to have a more powerful console than Xbox Series X. That will boost their revenue at the end of this year significantly.

PS5 pricing is all over the place, hovers between 469 and 528 Euro depending on discounts, official price of the Disc Model is 549 Euro. Which is why I think the price gap with the Pro will not be $100 but much higher.

PS5 Pro is a mistake. I've never heard anyone complain about the PS5 graphics or performance, people just want more games for the expensive console they bought. There's also plenty of folks still on PS4 because it's still supported so well and they have it hooked up to a desk monitor or whatever. 75% - 80% of the biggest PS5 games like Call of Duty and stuff are also on PS4. 

If they want to grow the market Sony should just drop the price to 399 Euro. The market isn't growing because prices went up significantly and aren't dropping plus most of the big games were letdowns. I think it started to crash with that Marvel game and it got worse from there.

There is also a number families are willing to pay for things like birthday and christmas gifts and that isn't $499. Just look at how well Helldivers II is doing at a reasonable price and how many systems Nintendo is selling at $299 and $199. Even Valve quickly found success by releasing the Steamdeck at just ~$399. Microsoft and Sony seem to think that gamers are dissapointed by the graphics or something.

This 'premium product' type of strategy Sony is trying only works if you go balls deep 2x, 3x or 4x the price like Nvidia did. The people that bought $300 graphics cards were willing to buy $1500 graphics cards, meaning you only have to sell 2 instead of 10. Nvidia could lose half their customers and still make double the money: 10*300 = $3000, 5*1500 = $7500. But even Nvidia has 'cheap' $299 options, which suck but are just 'good enough' to be viable against the competition.

As for Microsoft, it doesn't matter if the biggest most powerful next-gen Xbox ever exists if games also have to run on the Series S|X and rumored Xbox handheld or third party Xbox consoles.

[Potato]

Sony came up with a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Next Gen consoles have traditionally done well when they are keeping up with or exceeding what the PC market is doing. 

The fact is that the PC market has found a good groove at PS4 Pro levels and hasn't really pushed beyond that. There are no games on PC that can't also run on PS4 Pro at an acceptable level.

Sales of PS5 have started to drop because the early adopters have jumped in and the mainstream consumers are seeing no compelling reason to upgrade. Will be interesting to monitor what effect any PS5 Pro has and how long it is sustained.

[Nintex]

That's the key isn't it. PS4 (Pro) runs most of the biggest games like Elden Ring and Resident Evil 4 remake at give or take ~30fps.
Resident Evil 4 Remake even runs at 60fps on the PS4 Pro in performance mode, as do most Call of Duty games. 

Microsoft sort of gimped Xbox One X releases and stopped Xbox One X enhancements once the Series S was out (likely because the One X would often perform better than the Series S or look the same as the Series X at 30fps instead of 60fps). For a short while this only boosted framerates as you're running base Xbox One games on Xbox One X but because Microsoft demands games release on the One and One X, many third parties don't bother.

On the PC side of things, I watched this interesting look at the 1080 Ti today. Taking DLSS and Ray Tracing out of the picture it performs about as well as an RTX4060/RTX3060 in most games. 8 year old GPU is still viable for most games @1080p or @1440p and basically the PC baseline.


 
The Steamdeck is already at GTX 1050 levels and scratching at the surface of GTX 1060 performance.
If Nintendo manages to push that to GTX 1070 or even GTX 1080 levels (be it with some DLSS trickery) they're golden.

[Eric Cartman]

The Steamdeck is already at GTX 1050 levels and scratching at the surface of GTX 1060 performance.
If Nintendo manages to push that to GTX 1070 or even GTX 1080 levels (be it with some DLSS trickery) they're golden.

The steamdeck and the inevitable switch 2 both have the benefit that comes with being a handheld of having a fixed target resolution they can target, because they come with their own screen.

The steamdeck has this more in theory, due to it sharing a regular steam library, but locking a target resolution of - say - 1080p and then letting hardware upscaling to 4K and higher significantly lowers the requirements, and running at native res on the supplied display will always look good (depending on the quality of that display ofc, but I imagine 1080p screens are dirt cheap at very high quality thanks to the mobile market)

[Nintex]

When you realize 3 out of the 10 best selling Switch games are Wii U ports

[Nintex]

https://www.polygon.com/2014/5/15/5718168/mario-kart-series-sales

Mario Kart 8 will likely be the worst-selling game in franchise history, here's why
The Mario Kart series has long been a sales leader, ranking as the second-best selling game on Nintendo's last three hardware platforms, but even if every current Wii U owner bought the next installment, Mario Kart 8, it would still be the second-worst selling game in franchise history.

[Nintex]

[HardcoreRetro]

Why'd Polygon get rid of the pie chart?