Sales of Shenmue III: Where are we now?

RyoIsTheShenmueTree said:
How can a company not track the sales of their own game?

When they gave PC distribution rights to Epic, did they just sell Epic the right to sell it fo price, and Epic keeps all money made from sales and Epic does not have to let Deep Silver know how many copies were sold on the Epic store?
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It seems like this report was compiled by an external partner rather than Koch media and the Embracer group.

They should have a good idea as to how many copies are in circulation and I can understand why they wouldn’t want to share these exact figures with an external partner and would instead just tell them ‘sales are lower than we expected’.

What I can’t understand is how they could allow this external partner to publish figures from an unreliable source as part of a forecast. This kind of thing has the potential to devalue share prices and were I an investor, I would be very concerned to hear that a game that’s seen $4m+ of investment only has 50,000 copies in circulation (especially when factoring in that this figure most likely includes 50,000 backer copies).
 
tomboz said:
Regardless of whether or not they had unrealistic expectations of not, if it’s true that they’re unhappy with sales, it doesn’t bode too well as far as their continued involvement with the series goes.
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...or any other publisher for that matter. III has to at least make money in its first 3-6 months to shake the "Shenmue's a money pit" stigma, and for even the smallest of publishers to be interested in IV.

That isn't looking very likely, so Kickstarter, along with Shibuya's backing, is once again looking like the only realistic option.

So, if you weren't down with the low budget aspects of III then prepare yourselves, because the budget's only going to get tighter with IV, barring some kind of miracle (Epic chipping in to win some gamer cred...maybe a small publisher from Japan helping out due to their respect for Yu Suzuki...the options feel like a stretch).

The other option is, it just doesn't happen, or they go for the last-ditch "consolation" of a manga, or whatever, which would suck.
 
orient said:
...or any other publisher for that matter. III has to at least make money in its first 3-6 months to shake the "Shenmue's a money pit" stigma, and for even the smallest of publishers to be interested in IV.

That isn't looking very likely, so Kickstarter, along with Shibuya's backing, is once again looking like the only realistic option.

So, if you weren't down with the low budget aspects of III then prepare yourselves, because the budget's only going to get tighter with IV, barring some kind of miracle (Epic chipping in to win some gamer cred...maybe a small publisher from Japan helping out due to their respect for Yu Suzuki...the options feel like a stretch).

The other option is, it just doesn't happen, or they go for the last-ditch "consolation" of a manga, or whatever, which would suck.
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I’m not too sure on that. For all we know, DS saw that Mighty Number 9 had shipped over 1 million units and thought that with its record breaking Kickstarter, Shenmue 3 would surpass or at least match that number.

Ordinarily I’d suggest that a publisher should know better than to have such unrealistic expectations, but this is the same publisher that expected the game to sell with little to no marketing and allowed a partner to publish totally inaccurate figures in a profit forecast.
 
tomboz said:
I’m not too sure on that. For all we know, DS saw that Mighty Number 9 had shipped over 1 million units and thought that with its record breaking Kickstarter, Shenmue 3 would surpass or at least match that number.

Ordinarily I’d suggest that a publisher should know better than to have such unrealistic expectations, but this is the same publisher that expected the game to sell with little to no marketing and allowed a partner to publish totally inaccurate figures in a profit forecast.
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I'm all for looking at things in a positive light, but I've yet to see any evidence to suggest III has sold well, or "enough" for future investors to be interested. When we do then I'll very happily change my tune but, as of right now, I'm preparing my body for another Kickstarter.
 
I think we will have to take this one on the chin somewhat. But that doesn't mean we can't ask questions.

The last one of these financials they had an open email questions running and I got a reply outside of it last time around.

If I get chance to watch I'll be asking the following if they allow it again:

1. Does the figure include the deal from Epic? How did that impact these figures?

2. In terms of marketing was it found that the strategy was ineffective in pushing the game to new audiences and if so why? Should there have been more community engagement from Deep Silver?

3. Why were gaming media consistently using old assets in their articles? Should Deep Silver have done more around this?

4. We know that the figures Gamestat are often inaccurate. What is the long term projection/expectation for sales of Shenmue III from Deep Silver? Is more accurate data available?

Feel free to add anything else.

If they kickstarter it again I think it wont do anywhere near as well.
 
Guys, these numbers are made up :) the company you quoted has the same data we have, nothing more. No official figures, nothing.
 
orient said:
I'm all for looking at things in a positive light, but I've yet to see any evidence to suggest III has sold well, or "enough" for future investors to be interested. When we do then I'll very happily change my tune but, as of right now, I'm preparing my body for another Kickstarter.
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I think the real issue is that we don’t really have much evidence to give us any real indication of how Shenmue 3 has sold. We can make guesses, but until we have any kind of sales figures, it’s all speculation.

Edit: Decided to try another method for calculating copies in circulation that it never dawned on my to use at the time of compiling my original post.

By comparing the ratio of Shenmue players to other PS4 exclusives with confirmed sales figures, we can potentially get a rough idea of the number of copies in circulation.

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PSN Profiles continues to yield poor results, but when compared to Uncharted 4 and Marvel’s Spider-Man, the other 3 sites suggest that there are more than 200,000 copies of Shenmue 3 in circulation (with PSN Trophy Leaders and Exophase giving results all within a few thousand of one another). When compared to God of War, the figures are a little lower, but I suspect this is down to GOW having sold more since May of last year (the data across all 4 sites suggests that it has now sold more than Marvel’s Spider-Man). It’s very likely that all 3 of the games I’ve compared it to have seen a fairly significant increase in sales compared to the reported totals as all 3 reports came from various points last year.
 
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They are of course wise to revise their projections, that makes sense.

What I question is their use of Gamestat. Surely there's more concrete data around than that.

I've got 5 copies of the game. 4 are uponened and will likely never be. They all share the same CUSA number. So that's 4 unregistered copies for a start.

Until we get better data we have to roll with it. The community needs to keep things moving with the new hashtag and await better data.
 
RyoIsTheShenmueTree said:
How can a company not track the sales of their own game?

When they gave PC distribution rights to Epic, did they just sell Epic the right to sell it fo price, and Epic keeps all money made from sales and Epic does not have to let Deep Silver know how many copies were sold on the Epic store?
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Simply because Epic bought X amount of copies in advance. Let's say 100k. Those 100k copies were paid already. So Deep Silver/Ys Net see 0 dollar from those first 100k sales. And it's legitimate that only Epic would be able to track those copies they paid in advance.
 
GhostTrick said:
Simply because Epic bought X amount of copies in advance. Let's say 100k. Those 100k copies were paid already. So Deep Silver/Ys Net see 0 dollar from those first 100k sales. And it's legitimate that only Epic would be able to track those copies they paid in advance.
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Well, DS must have a tracking method, otherwise Epic could sell more copies than the prepurchased one. If not DS lawyers are fucking stupids
 
Kyo_JP said:
Rough currency conversion

625m SEK = $6.48m = €5.96m = £5.00m
550m SEK = $5.70m = €5.25m = £4.40m

It means that beside Shenmue III selling below expectations the only lowered their forecast $780k, €700k, £600k.

If they got around 1/3 revenue of each copy sold and all the lowering is because of Shenmue III it means about 35k copies bellow more or less. Of course we are lacking a lot of info, but after realizing that they were using SEK it does not see that bad, although it does not seem good, but they admit they got the Epic Exclusive income.
The positive thing there is that they aknowledge that fan reception have been positive. We will see on the 19th
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You are lacking a factor 10 in your conversion, e.g. 550M SEK ~ 57M USD.
 
Tortu-genial said:
Correct me if I am wrong, but the game was sold out on some site no?
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This is true, but without knowing how many copies were initially in stock, this doesn’t mean too much. Sites like Amazon might have had reservations about ordering in large volumes or there may have been distribution issues on Deep Silver and Square Enix’s ends.
 
tomboz said:
Maybe they expected Terminator to bomb?
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Possibly. Assuming that's the case, surely it calls into question their expectations for Shenmue III? Were they too high?

Also they most likely would have put more funding into Terminator, given the movie licence which isn't cheap, without the fallback of the Epic deal. I dunno it doesn't sound balanced IMO but I could easily be barking up the wrong tree.
 
Mugen said:
You are lacking a factor 10 in your conversion, e.g. 550M SEK ~ 57M USD.
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Yep, I miss 1 0 indeed. So then the numbers are more worrying
 
Kyo_JP said:
Yep, I miss 1 0 indeed. So then the numbers are more worrying
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I think you also overestimated the proportion of sales revenue that goes to the publisher.

Typically, around 50% of the sale price is split between the developer and publisher with the publisher taking the lion’s share.

Shenmue 3 is a little different though as YSNet put in more than 50% of the funding for the game. Unless they’re idiots, they will have likely negotiated a much larger split with DS (I’d guess 50/50).

DS seemingly planned a huge cut to the RRP ahead of launch, with most people picking up the game for around $30 and so you’d expect their projections to be based on the planned discount price rather than a full game price.

For S3’s poor performance to have accounted for a decrease in projected revenue of $7.8m, actual sales would have had to have been 260,000 below the expected number (assuming full price sales and DS taking 50% of revenue), 520,000 below the expected number (assuming full price sales and DS taking 25% of revenue or sales at $30 and DS taking 50% of revenue) or 1m+ below expected sales (assuming sales at $30 and a 50:50 split between DS and YSNet).
 
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