extralite said:
You can try to guess the reasons for why Tales doesn't do too well on Nintendo or other non-Sony platforms as much as you want. But the fact remains that Tales and the other not quite mainstream RPGs which became semi big on Playstation continue to do better on Sony turf.
but DS showed that even with lower prices the Nintendo RPG fans just don't match the numbers of the Sony ones.
Errr... except it
didn't show that. The DS is a far more successful RPG system than either PSP or PS3, by like an order of magnitude. Namco were one of the few publishers of successful RPGs who completely failed to take advantage of this.
Now, it's accurate that the two most successful systems for Tales games this generation are PS3 and then, a good distance behind it, PSP. (It's not accurate at all that this is representative of some larger RPG trend.) It's also true that of the five systems on the market at the time, those two are made by Sony.
It's certainly possible to dive down into a variety of causal factors here. Tales is an AV-oriented series (anime sequences, tons of voice-acting, etc.) Platforms that can't handle that might be at a disadvantage (the DS might handle Tales gameplay but not deliver the other elements that fans really want.) The release of a badly-received game on a given platform almost always also depresses sales of the next entry (we've had plenty of evidence of this over the years.) The relative scope could also play a role: DS had only "mothership" titles (despite the first two being outsourced and of low quality) when the PSP found its success primarily in fanservice spinoffs -- it's possible that people only wanted main entries on consoles (i.e. on PS3) but that spinoffs on DS could've sold just as well at lower budgets.
(The Wii and 360 were both problems for Japanese third-parties near across the board; it's not really unusual that Namco had bad results on either since so did everyone else.)
When you look at the factors above, you can craft a more nuanced description of the situation. You could say, for example, that the PS3 is the only system on the market this generation that was at all positioned as a successor to what console gaming was like the generation before (unsurprising, since "console gaming" in Japan the previous generation was essentially "PS2 gaming.") There are a lot of series that either carried over from the previous gen (Disgaea) or demanded full-on console executions (Valkyria) that naturally gravitated to the PS3 as the only suitable console, and the PSP as the PS2-like companion handheld. And since many people bought PS3s in anticipation of such games, it'd make sense that they'd buy them after they were released. But that's not a question of brand, it's a question of what each individual system represents in the marketplace.
Attributing it to "Sony systems," as if Tales fans alone have this fannish brand loyalty that is otherwise almost entirely absent in aggregate sales tracking, is lazy thinking. And the real risk here is applying this false correlation to future causation: "Tales fans love Sony platforms, so Namco should ignore all other business factors and just pick the Sony system." That's nonsense, and exactly why people should dig deeper than just looking at the labels on this sort of thing.
Takao said:
VC is about as much a JRPG as Disgaea is, which is to say, it really isn't.
For sales correlation purposes they both definitely are: selling to the same audiences with similar pitches.
You might as well start bringing up the Gust, and Compile Heart trash.
Gust games are just the B-list knockoff versions of Tales. It's actually super-relevant where Gust put their games because the niche market that buys buckets of animu RPGs is definitely going to own that system. This is kind of the flipside of the "umbrella game" concept -- much like one big successful game can prime the pump for successors, so too can a constant stream of insignificant games that sell to a ravenous audience. PS3 had both and they both helped build the audience for mid-range RPGs down the road.
