So I posted in the "Steam sales data thread" as well, but it's pertinent to this thread, too.
According to Ars Technica's extrapolated data, which has by and large proven to be quite accurate to date (no more than 10% variance either way), Valkyria Chronicles has done somewhere around 210,000 units to date.
This tracks with some of the data we had earlier in the thread (and is in the "really optimistic" range for forecasts), and given some of the data we had earlier, it's relatively safe to assume that at least half of those copies were near-launch copies, so they were all sold for ~$18. Many of the rest would've been the Christmas sale and whatnot, which never went below $10, IIRC.
So from this: a bit of napkin math tells us that even after Steam's cut
and likely taxes, Valkyria Chronicles has made enough money to cover the likely contract fee for Little Stone (probably somewhere between $100k to $300k, depending on terms and how long the port took), has made enough for Sega to drop the necessary
million dollars or so on an HD-PC version of Valkyria 3, and would
still have enough pure profit left over to contribute non-trivially to Sega's bottom line for the fiscal. And now we move into VC1PC's long-Steam-tail phase, where it can expect to roughly double that unit-sales figure over the next few years, with that being nothing but pure profit for Sega.
(Now, if they're just sitting on all the profits instead of investing it in VC3 like above, they a) are sitting on an actual Scrooge McDuck pile of money and b) are being kind of dumb if they aren't acting on one of their franchises getting jumpstarted back to life.)
I said back when this launched that we'd need to see sales in the hundreds of thousands by March to have any hope of VC3 (or maybe VC2, if Sega isn't paying attention to fan reaction) getting the Steam PC treatment, especially in the way that would actually ensure it'd be a success.
Well, here we are.
I would say that
now you can start dreaming that impossible dream. Because I know I am.
