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Tales of Zestiria has reached 110,000 owners on Steam as per Steamspy
- Thread starter Tizoc
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wapplew
Member
In a perfect world, this is great news for Japanese pub.
But part of me still worry Japanese games on PC will hurt console copy in the long run.
I mean big part Japanese games market is Asia and huge part of Asia still resort on piracy. When more and more of them come to PC, many might not buy them or only buy them at low price.
Hope I'm wrong on this.
But part of me still worry Japanese games on PC will hurt console copy in the long run.
I mean big part Japanese games market is Asia and huge part of Asia still resort on piracy. When more and more of them come to PC, many might not buy them or only buy them at low price.
Hope I'm wrong on this.
DarkLordMalik
Member
How is PC suddenly a factor in localization? Tales of Xilia or its sequel never required a PC to sell. Infact the whole push started again because Namco realized that they are too dumb to just sit on the series in the West. Just like SE is doing that with Dragon Quest series starting this generation.
I am happy that more games are getting localized and coming to PC. I hope this means we get some of the classics like Tales of Vesperia, Abyss, Destiny on the modern platforms.
Edit: In case people take my post the wrong way, based on my past posts.
I am saying that I doubt PC was a factor when they were planning a localization of games like Zestiria and Berseria. Now on the other hand, if the series is popular on PC and Namco starts bringing some of the "riskier" localization like I mentioned including Destiny, and Tales of Vesperia PS3, then maybe I can agree on it. Right now, it just seems that they consider PC a nice bonus but certainly not something to greenlight localizations.
As for why I think so, isn't it pretty obvious? Sword Art Online and Digimon were both localized for the PS4/Vita. There is no PC here. The latest Sword Art Online was basically confirmed for the West in the same year as Japan and it is Vita/PS4 exclusive. As for God Eater, it was basically confirmed for a localization judging from the trademark and the trophy lists that leaked a while ago so PC wasn't a factor here, again.
I would love for PC/PS4 to be more than enough to get a lot of the niche games in Japan, so I want this to become the case here. But we haven't reached that point yet, maybe we will do some day. Destiny/Vesperia PS3 on PC/PS4 will be great to have.
MutonCommander
Banned
It depends on what you care about. If you want more niche japanese games then PC releases are great because they bring more money to the developers and publishers of these games. If you only care about fucking list wars and your console having exclusive games then you'll be salty as fuck.
Pretty much this. Xillia really had potential to be a game as good as or better than Vesperia (heck, there were signs that the 3rd act actually could have been decent) but they rushed it. Then released a lazy, copy paste sequel a year later to "make up for it."
They engineered their own demise. Let the games have the proper time in the dev oven and stop releasing half-baked products.
I'm bitter about Xillia because of all of its wasted potential. Outside of being rushed, the game was excellent. Heck, it even had a call back to Tales of Phantasia through Milla. Ugh, such a waste...
Good for them then. I have some qualms about some of the battle system (i.e the wacky arts system) and the DLC was just terrible but it turned out to be a fairly solid Tales game. I hope the sequel improves on some areas and continues to sell well so we can continue to get Tales games.
I also thought Xillia was a great game.
But in spite of Xillia 2 having a lot of redeeming aspects, i can't be the only one on earth who actually thinks that releasing a sequel with so many recycled assets as a 'sequel' is going to hurt franchise potential?
It happened with FFX-2, and FF Lightning Saga.
It would have been better if Xillia 2 had not existed, and they simply gave the tales team more time to flesh out the next best thing
Even ignoring the implications for profit those are great numbers for the franchise. Combined with the number of the console versions these may already make Zestiria one of the most sold Tales games in the West after Symphonia.
The fun part about this is that this only ever has been true in Japan. Meanwhile in the West Tales enjoyed its biggest successes on non-PS platforms (Symphonia on GC, Vesperia on Xbox 360, now Zestiria on PC). =Ptales fanbase being on PS platforms (I'm using Hideo Baba's words)
.
Incidentally both Gust and Zestiria relied on the same company for characters models, FlightUnit.
This will stay true as long as profits are bigger in Japan than in all of the rest of the earth combined. Hearts R may be the first case where sales of a Tales game were higher in the West than in Japan. And it was previously discussed in this thread that profit on PC likely are significantly higher making it a success even if it sold as little as on console.
Imagine if Xillia had gotten Xillia 2's battle system because they actually finished the game. We'd have elemental weaknesses spread across a whole party instead of it all being hogged by one OP character. The only way to efficiently do combos in ToX2 was to use Ludger. It was obnoxious as hell.
I think it hurt the franchise to some extent. It definitely sold less than Xillia in Japan and the West. Its price on Amazon Japan also dropped faster.
I agree that it would have been better had they not made Xillia 2. It would have made more sense to move onto the next game. Xillia 2's plot really seems like it was meant for its own game considering how awkwardly it fits with Xillia's original plot.
Xillia 2 is ultimate a lose/lose situation for fans. Instead of getting one really good fleshed out anniversary game we got two half-baked ones and were charged $60 USD for both. Most people don't realize this, though.
I'm not so sure about this. Tales is a very Japanese franchise. The merchandise is pretty much tailored to a Japanese audience. And all the Tales public events happen in Japan. I don't see Bamco suddenly translating Perfect Guides and selling them here. Or selling things like figures and the crap load of other merchandise outside of Japan.
Honestly, I get the feeling that nowadays they care more about games as a means to push merchandise than anything. They need the Japanese audience to keep purchasing all that stuff because I seriously doubt they'd bother trying to sell so much merchandise outside of Japan.
Besides that, it seem with Japanese companies that even if they go international, they still focus on the Japanese market. I think it's really difficult for many Japanese companies to do otherwise.
There's no evidence suggesting that zestiria PC outsold the PS versions in the west or the contrary.
Also, how much did vesperia on the 360 sold? Did it sell better than xillia which did 100k+(august 2013 npd) in its first month in the US? Besides, Vesperia was never released on the PS3 in the west do its not like you can make a direct comparison.
Pellegri Testament
Member
Feelings would get hurt even if games stayed exclusive, that's one of the stupidest arguments against porting ever. These smaller companies have little to lose when it comes to if they should consider PC as a viable platform along with everything else they're releasing on. A handful of butthurt warriors having their feelings hurt isn't enough reason to not consider a PC release in cases like this.
I think it's pretty fair to say that if it hasn't already, it will over the next few months/year. If it's at this amount with only a 33% price drop so far, it's going to sell a lot more with future Steam sales.
It may very well be true but I wouldn't go around making definitive statements without any proof.
They haven't made much games since Tales studio was dissolved so we can't really know if there's enough staff to make two games at the same time. Either way, it turned out 3 years wasn't good enough to polish Zestiria, so I'm not expecting smooth development for Berseria.
Xillia sold around 320k in the west as of October 2014, more than Vesperia which is around 270k. Symphonia is at the top with 740k. GFK+NPD numbers.
DarkLordMalik
Member
Yes, these games so SOLD so well in the West that Namco dropped their localizations and only released them in Japan xD
It wasn't until Xilia became a huge success (1 million shipped WW) that we started to get almost every Tales of game. First they released Tales of Grace F, which sold decent for a first Tales of game on PS3. Then the release of Xilia made it one of the best selling Tales of game in the West. After that, Namco basically started localizing every Tales of game including Symphonia HD, Xilia 2 and also localized Hearts R thanks to the Twittter campaign. So saying that the Tales of games sold better on other platforms while it killed the localization is laughable.
Do you have more data than Baba, who has said that Tales of fanbase is on PS? These games have not only done well in the West, they have also done 2-3x what they did on the other platforms on PS3 in Japan.
Did I miss the data on Hearts R? I had no idea it sold better in West than in Japan.
GhostTrick
Banned
Symphonia actually sold well in West. As of 2007, the GC version sold like 953.000 units WW.
As Tales of Heart R selling more in West, it's not surprising since the game sold bad in Japan. 73k ltd.
DarkLordMalik
Member
Did Symphonia selling better in the West brought more Tales of games to Gamecube with localization in the West?
I just read the link and it is clear why it sold better.
It is basically:
1. Nintendo Marketing
2. First Tales of game in the series that was 3D, which is a BIG factor as well.
GhostTrick
Banned
Of course not. Japan will always be the first and foremost target for their developpement. But that wasn't the point though, which was that Tales of Symphonia sold well, and we kept getting more localised games, such as Tales of the Abyss.
DarkLordMalik
Member
The localization support died again after a while so while Symphonia might have done well in the West and brought more localizations, it wasn't until Graces F/Xilia release that we were basically guaranteed to get any Tales of game in the West.
If you go back to Xilia days or the announcement of Symphonia HD, people weren't even sure if they will localize the games.
clay_ghost
Member
This proves that BN mismanage tales of series, tota should be mutiplatfrom instead of ps2 exclusive, this would have build up the western market. There is an audience on Nintendo platform even the lower budget tos2 sold around the same as TOV on xbox360 and tota 3DS sold a lot ww for a cheap port.
Pellegri Testament
Member
What exactly was Abyss going to be multiplatform on? Outside of Twilight Princess, Gamecube was over and done with by the time it released. Xbox 360 didn't have any kind of significant Japanese developer following at the time. Both Wii and Ps3 came out after it's release, meaning they would have had to spend time with the port as they very likely did not have any significant time with dev kits beforehand, that and Ps3 was a bomb until they had a price drop a year later. Meanwhile, everyone and their mom owned a Ps2 at the time. The jrpg audience wasn't shifting around much in late 2006, because no one else had anything to make it shift.
Tales of the Abyss being on the dominant system at the time isn't exactly what I would call mismanaged.
Basileus777
Member
They could have ported it to the Wii and tried to establish an audience there at launch. Of course that only makes sense with hindsight.
PS2 was the only choice in the 6th gen. This is a fact. There was no real recourse for putting things multiplatform with that kind of dominance. Nintendo didn't even care about GC after a while, and neither did MS for Xbox OG. So why would BN bother?
They tried to support a Wii audience with Symphonia 2 and Graces. They failed miserably and crawled back to Playstation.
DarkLordMalik
Member
Which again confirms that Symphonia was an outlier since it was the first 3D Tales of game as per the comments made by Baba. People always points towards Symphonia like it was some kind of sign that Tales of games do well on Nintendo consoles, even if the developers themselves have stated otherwise.
GhostTrick
Banned
Graces had to be recalled. That should tell you all you need to know about that trashfire of a release.
Zestiria is a success in the west according to the official Tales twitter.
https://twitter.com/TalesofU/status/673794027322347520
https://twitter.com/TalesofU/status/673794027322347520
Watching streams of the Wii version of that game was a trip. Person would be in the middle of a battle and the music would just... break. And by break I mean it would 1) just stop or 2) start skipping obnoxiously.
Those were the days.
KimonoNoNo
Member
Hopefully we also can have obscure stuff get localized as well like Disaster Report 4 and that other game Granzella is doing for Namco.
DarkLordMalik
Member
Their Twitter account still has Tales of Hearts R promotional image as background. lol.
texhnolyze
Banned
Merchandising is not something BN does directly, it's an additional licensing revenue stream. That aside I thought it's pretty clear that Tales will stay a very Japanese series, the implication was more that more profit 'abroad' may make giving the games a higher budget more likely (yeah, fat chance there).
To put these PC numbers into perspective, until Xillia most Tales games didn't even break the 6 digits sales barrier in the West.
Vesperia 360 is like the only true evergreen Tales game both in Japan and internationally.
I wish we had DD numbers for it, I believe that's the one reason why Vesperia is still only on Xbox 360 in the West.
Honestly this was more tongue in cheek than anything. In Japan the Vita Tales games are infamous for bombing harder than even all the previous *spinoff* Tales games, the sales were this embarrassingly low. It's not a big achievement for the West to surpass that.
DarkLordMalik
Member
not for this franchise on pc. it enough for namco to keep giving us on pc. also, digital version will have lifetime sales, so numbers will just grow and profit will come on in years after. the goods about pc gaming.
texhnolyze
Banned
Weird, it's definitely showing Zestiria for me.
Perhaps it's your browser's cache or something? Or is it just me? Anyway, I don't use twitter.
Uh, what? I don't have the ps2 numbers but the only one which didn't last gen is Radiant Mythology.
Symphonia > 700k
Xillia > 300k
Vesperia, DotNW, Abyss 3DS > 200k
Graces F, Xillia 2, Symphonia Chronicles,
Phantasia GBA
Yeah, but in the end they are still both close to 100k (both were above 90k digital excluded by the end of 2014)
Uh ?
110k on PC is very good, but no need to downplay the previous episode sales that much.
Tales of Phantasia on GBA did (~120k), Tales of Vesperia did (~270k), Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World did (~230k), Tales of the Abyss 3DS did (~220k), Tales of Graces F did (~190k), Tales of Symphonia Chronicles did (~140k), Tales of Xillia 2 did (~170k by the end of January 2015).
I guess you were mostly refering to the PS2 era Tales (Legendia, Abyss) which weren't even localized outside of America.
All numbers are as of October 2014 except Xillia 2
EDIT : I guess 3Kaze and I are using the same numbers
Weird, it's definitely showing Zestiria for me.
Perhaps it's your browser's cache or something? Or is it just me? Anyway, I don't use twitter.
You two are talking about two different things.
Profile background does not equal profile header.
texhnolyze
Banned
Right, just as I thought. That's the consequence of not using a twitter, silly me.
You are right. I'm honestly not even sure what numbers you two are combining there to get the results you two posted. Sales numbers outside Japan are a mess...
Or, it confirms that symphonia 2 was a shit game and graces was broken. Tales did well on a Nintendo console, just as its doing well on PC. Being exclusive to ps, as per baba's repeated wishes, only hurts sales potential. Even bn can see that. Now.
NPD+GFK numbers for NA+EMEA I retrieved when I had access to their data months ago.
Regarding the earlier entries I found these numbers on GAF 3-4 years ago (NA only)
The fact that Tales of Graces was broken had nothing to do with its first week sales which were beyond terrible only beating Vesperia on 360 and not by a big margin (140 vs 100k), the game also didn't have better/worse legs than your usual title in the series. (only talking about Japan here of course)
DarkLordMalik
Member
Yeah, that are the kind of numbers I have in my memory, all below 6 digits except for the two big exceptions (Symphonia and Vesperia... I prefer to keep ignoring Dawn ;P ).
Naturally finally more consistently doing European releases of Tales games toward the end of that list would rise the overall sales in the West.
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