You've never heard of a game doing 2x what it does in the first 3 months? Okay...
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(all numbers from VGChartz / America only)
Nintendogs was out for over 4 months in 2005, during which time it sold 1.75 million units. Total sales are now around 5.5 million.
Three months after release Animal Crossing DS had sold around 500K. It has now sold over 1.5 million.
Brain Age sold less than 600K in it's first 3 months. Now around 1.8 million.
And the original Big Brain Academy sold less than 400K in it's first 3 months, to reach over 1.1 million currently.
Nintendo's long-tail games are really long-tail games.
Of course, the tails will shorten as these new types of games receive more competition from similar titles. But I don't think doubling from 500K seems so strange, looking at these examples. I only wish I could give an example from Wii instead of DS, but launch games and pack-ins don't make good comparisons, and obviously we don't have years of sales data.
@ErikAston, wouldn't only selling 520k copies worldwide up to this point (more than 3 months after release for US, and 5 months for Japan), be evidence that this game will not sell anywhere near 1 million copies?
I have to concur with Deltaneutral's comment about long tail sales. I've never heard of a game end up doing 2x what it has sold after 3 months.
@ErikAston, I think you are over optimistic on long-tail sales here. Games generally do 2/3 of their sales in the first 2 months. This means the majority of sales have been made by now.
After tracking VGC data against NPD data over the past few months, it appears VGC way over-estimates, especially for lower selling titles. These numbers can be 100-150% higher than they really are. We could really be looking at 260K copies sold so far. Given VGC's margin for error to the upside, this game's stock could be as low as 50 DKP.
We know that at best, VGC can be used for trending...and the trend is that Big Brain Academy was not a strong seller. Others have claimed that VGC is even conservative in this trend, which would imply that BBA is selling even worse than the trend shows.
Against all the competition this Holiday season, I can't see this one picking up momentum.
Boontje, I have NO DOUBT this game will sell 1 million copies.
We do have European numbers via VGChartz' game database.
http://vgchartz.com/games/game.php?id=2906
They list 80K sales for Europe, 200K for America (which makes sense based on the nearly 90K the game did in June NPD according to this page), and 240K sales for Japan, bringing total sales to 520K so far.
Based on the weekly American and Japanese sales on VGC, I'd guess the game is doing maybe 15K/week WW right now. Those sales will ramp down, but then there will be the Xmas boost. I think the game will reach the current projection of ~760K during 2007. And then sometime during 2008, the game should drop to a $40 and then $30 price point. Reaching 1M in sales seems totally reasonable to me.
It is too bad we don't have any numbers for Europe, but I wouldn't be surprised if it sold more copies there than in Japan/the US. It has shown up in top 10s for a number of countries and is also sold at a budget price.
In reality I think it will be a long time before we can be sure where this game ends sales wise, cause previous Brain Training games have shown tremendous legs. I personally wouldn't be surprised if the game ends up in Nintendo's next annual report as a million seller worldwide. (of course those would be shipped numbers and not sold, but still it would be a nice indication of actual sales)
LOL! That is funny. I don't think of myself as an Alan Greenspan, but I guess a bunch of people agreed that the stock was overvalued. I hadn't even looked at it for sometime but noticed it today and couldn't believe how much it had risen.
@Gaara42,Huh thats funny, when I loaded VGChartz earlier today it showed entirely different numbers than it shows in your links. I loaded up the profile for the game on their site and it shows 17DKP.
Doesn't matter though, at over 1 million the stock is still way way overvalued and I was just throwing 50 out there as a ballpark figure.
60DKP-70DKP seems like a much better prediction, if not a lower bound all together. You failed to mention that the 172,725 (17DKP) is only for America, while Japan has sold 244,360 (24.4DKP) copies of this game. That is 417,085 copies for Japan and America alone so far while in America it is still selling around 10,000 copies a week. European numbers are about 62,915, which brings the total to around 480,000 copies sold. Also, can we see the research for your statement that European sales are not improving, stating something without links or data to back it up isn't very convincing. From those numbers, the prediction of 50DKP will be reached in 2 weeks if US numbers stay the same, not taking into account the 6,000 copies being sold in Japan 17 weeks after its release. Therefore 60DKP-70DKP seems much more likely.
3
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(all numbers from VGChartz / America only)
Nintendogs was out for over 4 months in 2005, during which time it sold 1.75 million units. Total sales are now around 5.5 million.
Three months after release Animal Crossing DS had sold around 500K. It has now sold over 1.5 million.
Brain Age sold less than 600K in it's first 3 months. Now around 1.8 million.
And the original Big Brain Academy sold less than 400K in it's first 3 months, to reach over 1.1 million currently.
Nintendo's long-tail games are really long-tail games.
Of course, the tails will shorten as these new types of games receive more competition from similar titles. But I don't think doubling from 500K seems so strange, looking at these examples. I only wish I could give an example from Wii instead of DS, but launch games and pack-ins don't make good comparisons, and obviously we don't have years of sales data.