Persona 5 Royal, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and New Sakura Wars Sold Below Expectations - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 July 2020 / 3,151 Views
SEGA has released their earnings report for the third quarter of the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2020. The third quarter included the 2019 holiday season, which ran from October to December.
SEGA in the report said sales of three of their new releases were below expectation. This includes Persona 5 Royal, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and New Sakura Wars.
Persona 5 Royal and New Sakura Wars both launched exclusively in Japan during the quarter. That could be part of the reason sales did not meet SEGA's expectations. Persona 5 Royal will release for the PlayStation 4 in the west on March 31, while New Sakura Wars will launch in the west in Q2 2020.
Existing games "performed solidly" and exceeded their forecast. Operating income decreased year-over-year to the expenses of launching new games.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Maybe, just maybe they can make games multiplatform? Just a suggestion.
The fact these japanese devs are ignoring the Switch in their home turf is just dumb.
Not just Switch, but also PC and Xbox. Put it everywhere and maximize your revenue.
No audience for these games on Xbox, especially in Japan. Switch and PC, maybe.
That's what you get for not releasing a Switch version
Was hoping New Sakura Wars would have done at least a little better. I wasn't expecting Dragon Quest or P5R numbers but still.
Hold on a second. Persona 5 sold ~700k in Japan (~540k PS4, 160k PS3). Persona 5 Royal has sold 310k on PS4 alone. That's 44% of the original (57% PS4 vs PS4). What kinda sales did Atlus expect? Persona 4 Golden outsold Persona 4 yes, but it was also on a completely different platform and had portability. I'm a big PlayStation fan but if Sega wanted more sales from P5R they should have made it multiplatform with Switch and accessed a new (and larger) market. Personally, I think P5R's performance is highly respectable.
Unfortunately, Sega and its investors don't agree on P5R's performance. I'd have liked to have seen a Switch version but I don't know how much it would have boosted P5R's sales.
Theres no way persona 5 r would have sold more with a switch version.... at all.... right sega? I'm glad it flopped. Stupid ideas deserve bad sales.
Mario & Sonic is basically a good game, but the missing championship mode and the annoying music are killing it.
They god somewhat blindsided by P5's success. But P5R is nonetheless just a re-release of a JRPG on a single platform. The market's not as big as they may want it to be for that kind of release.
P5R was a perfect opportunity to port it to other platforms and increase it's customer base, but they blew it. And M&S Olympics could have done great if they released it just as Olympic hype was starting to build, not in the middle of a holiday season when no one is thinking about the summer Olympics.
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