ziran said:
i'm wondering what each brain training will end up selling in japan? their sales are continuing to be just astonishing! i mean is it feesible for each game to top 5 million? they are (relatively) cheap and have such universal appeal, their potential is very difficult to estimate.
similarly for animal crossing. is 4 million+ possible?
Well we are in unprecidented territory really, and the only comparison that comes even close is the original Pokemon.
All three titles are well beyond any type of sales pattern. To be honest the way I'd look at it is as follows:
-The games will continue to sell in the top 10 at 50k+ a week for a certain time. You have to imagine that sales will drop off eventually, but who knows when? I can certainly see it continuing through April and early May just because of the strength of the hardware which seems to be driving software at the moment, but after that who knows? If AC / BT2 continues at around 80k a week and BT at 50k until mid-May we'll be at:
Animal Crossing- 3.0m
Brain Training- 2.3m
Brain Training 2- 2.4m
-At some point you have to see the games tail off. If this does start to happen mid-May (no reason necessarily why it should, but worst case) then if you compare to something like Pokemon Red/Green/Blue (which obviously had a stupidly huge period of selling about 150k a week and then dropped back down to more reasonable levels in about week 100 after the 2nd xmas) then the title still sold another 1.5m after that. I think that even when these games do begin to drop back to sub 30k a week, they will still have another million left in them at least and Brain Trainings maybe moreso that AC, an advantage of being released towards the start of a systems life.
Based on all this, as a MINIMUM I'd have to say that the following is achievable.
Animal Crossing- 4.0m
Brain Training- 3.5m
Brain Training 2- 3.8m
And if I was being a betting man and assuming that this current period will probably last even longer through the year, I'd say:
Animal Crossing- 4.5m
Brain Training- 4.0m
Brain Training 2- 4.3m
Which would put the games easily in the top ten EVER in Japan and really would be more than any Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Mario Kart and so on have ever sold. You have to look forward to the release of Pokemon D/P towards the end of the year and whether that will boost or eat into the sales of these games, I suspect the former and you'd have to guess Pokemon at around 6m as well, so the list of 4-million sellers in Japan could look something like:
Pokemon R/B/G- 10.23
Pokemon G/S- 7.21
Super Mario Bros- 6.81
Pokemon D/P- 6.50
Pokemon R/S- 5.29
Animal Crossing- 4.50
Brain Training 2- 4.30
Tetris- 4.24
Super Mario Land- 4.19
Dragon Quest VII- 4.12
Brain Training- 4.00
Scary stuff indeed !