Why? I think you and others are misinterpreting my comment. I am not saying it will suddenly sell 10x the copies in the coming month. I am familiar with how sales are generally frontloaded. However, as I stated, when comparing it to other games on that list it only had 3 days worth of sales. It's fair to point that out.
If you casually look at that list, the sales look dwarfed by major franchises like MH and Smash that have millions of sales over many months/years. 12k looks tiny compared to those, and obviously CR will never sell gangbusters. But it could easily be doing as well as Fifa PS3 (4k this week, 20k total, not unreasonable to match for a game that had 12k in 3days). Is that a bomb? Again, without any frame of reference for what a bomb/hit sells in 3 days in Japan, it's hard to know. Especially given it wasn't designed from scratch, but is a port, which makes it cheaper to make and profitable sooner.
I've got no stake in this game. I never played CR, don't care if it's a hit or not. But without frame of reference, it's hard to know what constitutes a bomb for a port with 3 days of sales in a single country. What number did that 12k have to be before someone would say 'fair sales'? 20k? 100k? Seems to me 12k isn't terrible given the specifics. Not a huge hit, certainly, but who expected that? It sold over 3x more than the only other new release on that list, and the only 3 games that beat it that week are massive franchise games that have millions of sales.
My bigger problem is with the "3 days worth of sales" bit of your argument (it's actually 4 days, the same as any other game - more on that in a sec). I see it brought up every time a game under-performs in first week sales (most recently: Bayonetta 2), despite the fact that 99% of games follow the same trajectory which is a big first week, followed by depleting subsequent weeks of various degrees (for example, long established JRPGs - Final Fantasy/Legend of Heroes etc., tend to drop quickly).
For pretty much everything, if it had a weak first week of sales, how many days it actually had in that tracking period isn't going to make much of a difference (though it's the same as everything else for CRIII). Majority of games are front-loaded.
So Chaos Rings released on the 16th. That gives it 4 days of sales (Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun). That's the same as most other games, except the odd special case of games that release on a Saturday (i.e. Bayonetta 2). Therefore, it can be compared to pretty much any other release on any console because it's being tracked for the same period.
And compared to any other game, it's done pretty poorly. 12k is in the region of what Exstetra sold on Vita; it's less than Sorcery Saga sold etc. Those are niche JRPG's from niche publishers.
The biggest indication that it bombed is the sold-through on Famitsu. They showed it as selling through 20-40% of its stock. Most hit games sell through 80-100%, but you'll see plenty of successes that sell 60-80% (and a few weird cases like Taiko that can sell 20-40% or so on their first week). I would assume that Chaos Rings will follow the general rules, rather than the exceptions.
Anyway, the sellthrough means that either Square Enix, or retailers, or both expected the game to do much better than it actually did. My understanding of Japanese retailers is that they don't return games to the publisher if they go unsold, meaning they're much more careful with ordering stock so as to not have to liquidate it later at ridiculously cheap prices (example: Gaist Crusher).
There are going to be games that perform differently than normal. Taiko no Tatsujin has always had a weird sales curve. Nintendo games are leggy. But hoping that every under-performing game is going to be the exception rather than the rule because of x days first week sales (which seems to happen a lot lately) is what's frustrating.
That isn't just directed at you by the way. I do understand the logic behind the argument. It just rarely works out that way in reality.
rime, Freedom Wars, Murasaki baby..
