Disqus - Latest Comments for Ishaan

Re: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Shipments Reach 3 Million Worldwide

Ishaan — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 02:12:27 -0000

Yeah, I'd imagine BOTW is doing most of the legwork here, yeah. Like, I don't think the original Hyrule Warriors would have done nearly this well, even if it was on Switch instead of Wii U (see: FE Warriors).

Re: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Shipments Reach 3 Million Worldwide

Ishaan — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 07:13:54 -0000

Hahahaha. I don't think anyone expected it to hit these numbers this quickly--not even me.

Re: Animal Crossing: New Horizons Has Outsold Pokémon Sword & Shield in Japan

Ishaan — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 21:52:05 -0000

There's no "dissing" here. In Japan, the Pokemon games are primarily marketed to children, and so is the anime. Animal Crossing, on the other hand, is marketed to both children and adults, which is where those additional sales are coming from.

Re: Animal Crossing: New Horizons Has Outsold Pokémon Sword & Shield in Japan

Ishaan — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 21:48:16 -0000

It has always sold really well, but New Horizons has a very high chance of outselling even that game. And just from a global brand perspective, NH is much more recognizable than NL, which was much more recognizable than WW.

Re: Animal Crossing: New Horizons Has Outsold Pokémon Sword & Shield in Japan

Ishaan — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 11:25:02 -0000

Pokemon is selling just fine, all things considered. It isn't that Pokemon is selling badly, but that Animal Crossing has been growing with each subsequent release.

Re: One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 Debuts With the Series’ Lowest Sales in Japan

Ishaan — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 13:06:35 -0000

The answer of how to reach a broader audience is what it's always been. Quality.

Sadly, it's never that simple—especially in Japan, where the market has been in decline for well over a decade at this point. In order to reach a broader audience, you need to give them something they haven't seen before, because they aren't like enthusiasts. They aren't interested in buying the "same game" every couple of years with a new coat of paint. Namco and Koei would have needed to do something different with PW4 for it to sell better in Japan. As it stands, I'm inclined to believe that they're banking on global sales to help even the numbers out.

Re: One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 Debuts With the Series’ Lowest Sales in Japan

Ishaan — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 09:44:32 -0000

For something like Dynasty Warriors or Samurai Warriors, sure, that theory works just fine. The thing is, with a brand like One Piece, a lot of your potential audience doesn't even play videogames. (At least, that was certainly the case with Pirate Warriors 1)

The issue is that these games aren't selling to the broader audience any more, they're largely selling to people that play videogames and also happen to like One Piece. That's the problem Namco and Koei need to address—figuring out how to reach a broader audience.

Re: One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 Debuts With the Series’ Lowest Sales in Japan

Ishaan — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 07:37:53 -0000

I don't think the issue here is really one of the "Musou brand," since Warriors is essentially a template for different licenses at this point, and each series has its own dedicated audience. That's especially true for a license as mainstream as One Piece, which theoretically shouldn't be impacted by what other Warriors games have done.

Re: One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 Debuts With the Series’ Lowest Sales in Japan

Ishaan — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 07:22:22 -0000

PW1 definitely released when there was a perfect storm brewing around One Piece in general. I don't think Namco ever thought PW4 was going to reach those same heights, but after a 5-year hiatus (which is fairly lengthy in today's industry), it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the game to do significantly better than PW3 at least. (Worldwide, it might still do that, though.)

Re: Xenoblade Developer Monolith Soft Has Grown to 243 Employees

Ishaan — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 23:46:25 -0000

That project is more than likely Breath of the Wild 2. There's a chance it could be something else, but so far a lot of the pieces line up.

Re: PlatinumGames’ New Studio Will Work On Service Games for Consoles

Ishaan — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 00:41:41 -0000

Actually, this discussion made me realize that Platinum has never explicitly stated whether G.G. is being worked on by the Tokyo studio. There are a lot of statements clubbing the two together, but we don't have confirmation of who exactly is developing. We've updated the story to reflect this.

Re: PlatinumGames’ New Studio Will Work On Service Games for Consoles

Ishaan — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 00:05:30 -0000

It depends on what you mean by "service" game. If G.G. does have service game elements, it could be as simple as new monsters/bosses being added to the game every few weeks. There's nothing to suggest that it's going to be a full-on service game at the moment.

A more "engaging"' service game has a lot more going on—like a Destiny or a Monster Hunter World—and Inaba's use of "LiveOps" suggests that's what they want to explore.

Re: PlatinumGames’ New Studio Will Work On Service Games for Consoles

Ishaan — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 23:45:38 -0000

They haven't said Project G.G. will be a service game, just that the studio will also explore service games going forward.

Re: A Look at How Much Fire Emblem Developer Intelligent Systems Has Grown Lately

Ishaan — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 23:50:23 -0000

I suspect MyNavi accounts for contract staff (which often parts ways with the company after the projects they're on have ended), which is why I defer to the official website. But yeah, if you go by MyNavi, they did see a phase where the headcount was even higher.

Re: Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl — Gold Seeks to Sate Your Grinding Appetite

Ishaan — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 23:43:02 -0000

I get the impression that the localization team was smart enough to know there was no way this game would manage to capture the kid audience in the west. And so, they localized it for an older audience instead. That probably was a smart decision.

Re: A Look at How Much Fire Emblem Developer Intelligent Systems Has Grown Lately

Ishaan — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 02:00:47 -0000

I wouldn't draw any conclusions just yet, but the general takeaway would be that IntSys is staffing to both cope with HD development as well as continue being able to work on multiple projects in parallel. On the whole, it's just generally good news because it means that they're being afforded the opportunity to staff up and grow and be one of Nintendo's leading second-party studios.

Re: A Look at How Much Fire Emblem Developer Intelligent Systems Has Grown Lately

Ishaan — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 01:56:24 -0000

Whoops, that was a leftover line from a previous draft. Thanks for pointing it out. It's been corrected.

Re: A Look at How Much Fire Emblem Developer Intelligent Systems Has Grown Lately

Ishaan — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:59:52 -0000

Let's dig into this a little deeper with some very loose napkin math, just to give people an idea of how the revenue these games bring in compares.

FE Heroes has earned $656 million in player spending over the course of three years. Now, assuming iOS and Android take a 30% cut of that as platform holders, you end up with $459.2 million for IntSys/Nintendo.

Meanwhile, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a $60 game released in July 2019. Let's assume the worst case scenario—that every single copy of the game was sold via a retail store (which is impossible), so Nintendo had to give a 30% cut to retailers for each copy sold.

That gives us: $60 x 2.58 million units sold by Dec 31st = $154.8 million. Take away 30% of that for retailer royalties and you're left with $108.3 million earned over 5 months.

Observations:

• Now, realistically, the revenue for Three Houses is probably a little different from my five-minute napkin math (and probably higher, since a bunch of copies were sold digitally directly via Nintendo eShop, so no 30% royalty to retailers on those).

• However, even with this caveat, there's no way that's going to reach anywhere near the $459.2 million earned by Heroes even over the next three years just through sales of the game.

• Also, this comes following three years of development time, during which 3H was earning no money (because it was still being developed).

• On the flip side, 3H is doing something Heroes never can: it's selling Nintendo Switch consoles, which enables Nintendo and third-party developers to sell software to more Switch users in the future. This is a benefit that we can't possibly quantify, and it's the whole point of first-party development.

• Additionally, 3H will undoubtedly see a fair bit of DLC sold over the course of its life to the people that purchased the game. All of that is revenue directly in Nintendo and IntSys's pockets with no external royalties present. Again, this is impossible to quantify, but for context DLC sales contributed 15% additional revenue towards Fire Emblem Awakening immediately following its launch in Japan alone. This figure for 3H, worldwide, is going to be much higher.

So in conclusion: this is an apples to oranges situation. Both mobile and console games have their place. Both have their pros and cons, and as long as they're both doing well, there's no need to worry. It's safe to say Nintendo isn't prioritizing mobile development over console development for the foreseeable future. And on the flipside, Heroes probably introduced a bunch of new people to Fire Emblem, and some of those people have probably gone on to buy a Switch and 3H.

Re: A Look at How Much Fire Emblem Developer Intelligent Systems Has Grown Lately

Ishaan — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 22:44:09 -0000

Yeah, hence the Siliconera logo on the graph! I'm very much a data nerd and we love educating the audience about the industry, so expect more stuff along these lines whenever there's cool stuff to dig up. :)

Re: A Look at How Much Fire Emblem Developer Intelligent Systems Has Grown Lately

Ishaan — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 22:32:07 -0000

Just to clarify, developers themselves rarely do this. We went digging the information up by looking at IntSys's employee numbers over the years. We've done similar reports on other studios in the past as well, and we'll do more in the future.

Re: Japanese Wii Exclusive Earth Seeker Gets Full English Fan Translation

Ishaan — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 21:18:58 -0000

Oh my god. I remember the commercials for this.

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Re: PlatinumGames to Make “Major” Announcement Soon

Ishaan — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 04:01:44 -0000

I wouldn't read into the colours of the P4 logo. TW101 is part of the initiative as well, and is obviously a much more colourful game.

Re: PlatinumGames to Make “Major” Announcement Soon

Ishaan — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 03:19:13 -0000

Oop, typo. Fixed, thanks.

Re: #BreakFreePersona Trending on Twitter, Asks for Persona Games on Switch

Ishaan — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 03:20:40 -0000

The survey by Atlus Japan is how this whole thing started. The survey asked for feedback from Switch users, news of which caught on in the West, leading to IGN speaking to Atlus USA, which in turn led to the hashtag on Twitter. Everything started with the survey. That was the point of the article as well. This originated from Atlus Japan.

Re: #BreakFreePersona Trending on Twitter, Asks for Persona Games on Switch

Ishaan — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 02:51:49 -0000

Yeah, it's pretty silly semantics. Probably better if we'd avoided this long, unnecessary debate in the first place. We just derailed the comments for no good reason.