Just to be on the safe side, I will say yes, but won't be surprised if it does it physically as well.
It just has really good synergy with
New Horizon audience, seems like the most feature full entry into the franchise, there is additional DLC already announced which prior games of the franchise never got. I don't anticipate a new game in the franchise until 2023/2024, so it should continue to sell a steady amount beyond it's first year on the market. I won't be surprised if for example next year it's sells over
250K additional copies physically.
Also we can now say that
Marvelous has a pretty good track record of outperforming expectations
Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns in 2016 managed nearly
200K sales and that was a mainline game in the franchise on the 3DS, perhaps the release time was unfortunate for the game as the 3DS was winding down. Before that they had
Harvest Moon: Linking the New World which did
250K after launching in 2012.
Compare that to
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town a 3-D remake of a Gameboy game, usually remakes don't do well in Japan yet with digital it probably surpassed both
Trio of Towns and
Linking the New World currently sitting at over
167K physical sales
There is also
Sakuna which is currently
Marvelous best selling game in Japan, across the PS4/Switch it's already close to
500K and should surpass this figure by mid-year, as we know it's over
220K physical across the two platforms. According to Nintendo's shipment data it's sold at least
150K digitally in 2020, PS4 version also had some stock problems so I don't think it would be surprising if it sold
30K on there digitally, making the game likely above
400K shipped+digital in Japan at the moment.
We've known for a few months that retailers will have ordered at least
200K copies for the launch, and it's looking very likely that the game could be the third biggest launch for a third party on the system. People didn't expect
Momotaro to have such a large shipment that sold out so quickly, but especially with these type of games retailers don't underestimate demand because they know even if they order half a million they will sell it eventually without needing to cut the price.
It's competition at the moment is
Age of Calamity but unlike
Age of Calamity it's not a musou so legs will be much better, I anticipate it will also have better legs than
DQXIS which despite showing stellar legs for an JRPG, had already launched on the 3DS/PS4 - so it can't reach the heights of a hypothetical
DQXII:
Top 10 Third Party launches on Switch
- Momotaro Dentetsu (Konami) - 345.697
- Dragon Quest XI S (Square Enix) - 303.204
- Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Koei Tecmo) - 173.215
- Yo-kai Watch 4 (Level 5) - 150.721
- Dragon Quest Builders 2 (Square Enix) - 127.404
- Octopath Traveler (Square Enix) - 109.579
- Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate (Capcom) - 94.973
- eBaseball Powerful Pro Baseball 2020 (Konami) - 94.876
- Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball (Konami) - 75.505
- Derby Stallion (Game Addict) - 74.244
For
Bravely Default 2 the game is likely to have supply problems,so I think the initial shipment will only allow it to sell somewhere between
100-130K in it's launch week, depending on restock, WoM, future DLC we shall see how far it goes but its been noted that demand really picked up in the last few weeks. Retailers and
Square continue to underestimate demand for JRPGs, same thing happened with
Octopath &
Trials of Mana - both those games took forever to restock.
Square seems to only have trust in
Dragon Quest when it comes to Switch -
DQB2 for example had a shipment of around
200K all the way back in December 2018, while
DQXIS had a shipment of around
400K those are pretty big differences compared to how they will treat
Bravely Default 2 but I'm not too worried about the game I think it will surpass prior entries now that the reviews are out, seems it's a very decent game and there is nothing recent really competing with it. However I do think
Rune Factory 5 will end up easily outselling it when it launches in a couple of months, at least early signs are pointing towards it having very strong pre-orders - hence a strong initial shipment and strong support planned by
Marvelous. Compare that to
Square who don't really bother supporting games like
Octopath Traveler that end up selling
2.5 mil World Wide(a great result for any other Japanese Developer)
Square really seems to launch games and move on, and that limits their long-term sales - whether it's
DQB2 or
Octopath, or something else - if they supported those games with some additional content in 6-12 months I think they would have gotten a much better result.
s.famitsu.com
