Shenmue 3 Sales

Status
Not open for further replies.
The entire Shenmue situation is a complex one and we probably have to wait 6 months to get a clearer picture. There's just too many variables to consider

  • What are the physical sales of Shenmue 3?
  • What are the digital sales of Shenmue 3?
  • Do the kickstarter copies count as sales?
  • How many collectors editions sold?
  • How many copies after the epic allocation sold?
  • How much money did Epic give to Deep Silver & ysnet?
  • Did Shenmue 3 break into the chinese market and sell there?
  • Is Bestbuy selling a lot of copies as its at the top of their videogame black friday deals?
  • Is Shenmue doing well overseas (usa, uk, jap, eu etc etc)
  • How much copies will sell on steam when its released?
  • Will Shenmue 3 be a game that sells gradually over time?
  • How well did Shenmue HD do? We only have rough figures up until the end of last year. This entire year is a mystery and there's no data. We do know its still selling.
  • How much money does Sega get for Shenmue HD being on gamepass?
  • etc etc
Its currently Epic's second highest viewed video on their channel and it only got uploaded a few days ago. There's definitely a push going on. We just have to wait and see

gznNQyq.png


Seems like the only people who would know if its a success is Sega, Deep Silver and Ysnet. We'll just have to wait and see. 6 months from now we should know hopefully.
 
Last edited:
Yokosuka said:
Shenmue III is 17th in UK

www.gamesindustry.biz

UK Charts: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is back at No.1 as Nintendo Switch conquers top ten

Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is back at No.1 in the UK physical charts despite a 16% drop in sales week-on…
www.gamesindustry.biz www.gamesindustry.biz
Click to expand...
oof that's pretty bad given there were no other releases this week so it just lost to older games.

Tomato Convenience Store said:
Another thing to consider is that sales on the EGS give a bigger cut to the publisher than a game that's sold on PlayStation (or Steam in the future). Hopefully that lowers the sales numbers needed to greenlight Shenmue IV if the plan is to stick with UE4 and release on EGS.

80
Click to expand...
The issue is how Epic's deal actually works, Epic doesnt just give them money upfront, they promise a certain amount of sales, essentially they would say that shenmue 3 is promised lets say 100K copies, then by a certain period after that the game only sold 40K through epic, then epic would proceed to pay the difference of 60K copies.

This has been why Epic has been seemingly throwing money at games left and right, cause in reality if a game performs better than the deal itself then Epic essentially doesnt lose any money. But at the same time unless the game does perform better then stuff like shenmue 3 isnt actually going to see any benefit from the lower take. The actual beneficial thing on the pc front is just when the exclusivity deal is up a year from now hopefully some people on steam actually buy it.
 
Im probably being seriously obtuse here, but even if epic doesn’t give them the money upfront for say 100k sales, and there’s a shortfall of 60k sales, but epic pay that out of their own pocket anyway, how does this not mean 100k to DS & YSNet regardless? Like I said, I’m probably being obtuse but that’s the way it seems from the explanation above.
 
So, Shenmue I and II sold well better than Shenmue III even if they were just remasters from old games...

geez
 
Sh3ppy said:
Im probably being seriously obtuse here, but even if epic doesn’t give them the money upfront for say 100k sales, and there’s a shortfall of 60k sales, but epic pay that out of their own pocket anyway, how does this not mean 100k to DS & YSNet regardless? Like I said, I’m probably being obtuse but that’s the way it seems from the explanation above.
Click to expand...
That's how it works, I was explaining that it's not a deal where they give money upfront and then they also get the revenue from sales after that. It's more just the deal until it can surpass the promised amount. Its a good deal I'm just illustrating the difference between

-Heres 10 million dollars, now every copy from here on out is an additional source of revenue with less cut from us
versus what they actually do
-you are promised 100K sales(dont get hung up on that number its just an example), epic will pay you that upfront but you wont see any additional profit for sales here on out on the egs until it surpasses that number.

Essentially take that as a warning as well, that buying shenmue 3 on epic games store doesnt actually help the game right now unless you think somehow it doing well on it would cause epic to support 4 or something, which is kind of a stretch especially by the time 4 happen who the hell knows how the egs will even be.
 
jsh020 said:
That's how it works, I was explaining that it's not a deal where they give money upfront and then they also get the revenue from sales after that. It's more just the deal until it can surpass the promised amount. Its a good deal I'm just illustrating the difference between

-Heres 10 million dollars, now every copy from here on out is an additional source of revenue with less cut from us
versus what they actually do
-you are promised 100K sales(dont get hung up on that number its just an example), epic will pay you that upfront but you wont see any additional profit for sales here on out on the egs until it surpasses that number.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it would be somewhat nonsensical if they paid for 100k upfront and then paid for every unit sold after that. I read somewhere that the deal was 250k units. It’s one of the reasons I personally believe IV is a sure thing.
 
Sh3ppy said:
Yeah, it would be somewhat nonsensical if they paid for 100k upfront and then paid for every unit sold after that. I read somewhere that the deal was 250k units. It’s one of the reasons I personally believe IV is a sure thing.
Click to expand...
I don't know how much the epic deal is actually going to help Shenmue 4. Like Yu Suzuki keeps talking about needing to find investors and all the money from the epic deal goes straight to Deep Silver not Ysnet. I keep getting this feeling that Deep Silver is only onboard for shenmue 3 as a one and done thing unless it did well and that YSnet is on their own to find funding for the next game when all they have are bad sales to show as an incentive.

I think we are pretty much in the state where Shenmue's future rests entirely on whether deep silver sticks with it. I just dont see anyone else really wanting to jump on much less sega.

Ashnard said:
So, Shenmue I and II sold well better than Shenmue III even if they were just remasters from old games...

geez
Click to expand...
Thats not too uncommon honestly, thats just an easier point of entry and not everyone is gonna beat them and hop right into 3, many are gonna give it a go and not like it and many will also just straight up not play it and have it on the backlog. Though outside that 3's sales arent looking too hot on their own judging from the UK sales.
 
Last edited:
jsh020 said:
I don't know how much the epic deal is actually going to help Shenmue 4. Like Yu Suzuki keeps talking about needing to find investors and all the money from the epic deal goes straight to Deep Silver not Ysnet. I keep getting this feeling that Deep Silver is only onboard for shenmue 3 as a one and done thing unless it did well and that YSnet is on their own to find funding for the next game when all they have are bad sales to show as an incentive.

I think we are pretty much in the state where Shenmue's future rests entirely on whether deep silver sticks with it.
Click to expand...

I didn’t realise Yu had stated all the epic money was going to DS. That certainly changes things. It would be perfect if SEGA brought Shenmue home. Possibly unrealistic, but it would be nice.
 
Sh3ppy said:
I didn’t realise Yu had stated all the epic money was going to DS. That certainly changes things. It would be perfect if SEGA brought Shenmue home. Possibly unrealistic, but it would be nice.
Click to expand...
Yu didnt say all the money went to epic, thats just more how the deal works in general, publishers are the ones who set that up. Self-published indie devs are the only ones that would really be speaking to epic directly over it
 
jsh020 said:
Thats not too uncommon honestly, thats just an easier point of entry and not everyone is gonna beat them and hop right into 3, many are gonna give it a go and not like it and many will also just straight up not play it and have it on the backlog. Though outside that 3's sales arent looking too hot on their own judging from the UK sales.
Click to expand...
I honestly don't see anything to worry about here with the UK sales. Like I said earlier, these charts only record physical game sales. It's an increasingly unreliable metric these days, with even console gamers are shifting further towards digital purchases. If nothing else Shenmue 3 did manage to outsell Football Manager 2020, which while not having the biggest week 1 debuts is a steady seller with a dedicated fanbase, that's why Sega makes a new version each year. So I say that if Shenmue 3 can match something like Football Manager then we're in good stead for getting Shenmue 4 made.
 
Kintor said:
I honestly don't see anything to worry about here with the UK sales. Like I said earlier, these charts only record physical game sales. It's an increasingly unreliable metric these days, with even console gamers are shifting further towards digital purchases. If nothing else Shenmue 3 did manage to outsell Football Manager 2020, which while not having the biggest week 1 debuts is a steady seller with a dedicated fanbase, that's why Sega makes a new version each year. So I say that if Shenmue 3 can match something like Football Manager then we're in good stead for getting Shenmue 4 made.
Click to expand...

Digital sales matter yes but its still not good news to be that low. I saw an article when looking up what Shenmue HD's sales were around 100K for its first week but it didnt specify where it was so it might of been a worldwide estimate, so who know how much it sold in UK and by extension what half of the sales of that would be to guestimate what 3's sales figure it.

Hoping for the best, expecting the worst
 
Last edited:
jsh020 said:
Digital sales matter yes but its still not good news to be that low. I saw an article when looking up what Shenmue HD's sales were around 100K for its first week but it didnt specify where it was so it might of been a worldwide estimate, so who know how much it sold in UK and by extension what half of the sales of that would be to guestimate what 3's sales figure it
Click to expand...
That's some pretty sketchy maths, it assumes that both weeks share the same relative sales despite being over a year apart. It's quite plausible that Shenmue 3 sold a similar amount to Shenmue 1 & 2 HD even if it technically ranked lower in the charts. Especially since Shenmue 1 & 2 HD was released in August while Shenmue 3 was released in November, the start of the much busier Christmas period.
 
I don't know how reliable it is and how much physical stock they did, but someone in a french forum said that he saw people come at his store to buy shenmue 3 because the other stores where out of stock.

Edit : also when I searched for a cheaper key than 50€ for the egs version, some vendors of key were also out of stock.
 
Last edited:
Kintor said:
That's some pretty sketchy maths, it assumes that both weeks share the same relative sales despite being over a year apart. It's quite plausible that Shenmue 3 sold a similar amount to Shenmue 1 & 2 HD even if it technically ranked lower in the charts. Especially since Shenmue 1 & 2 HD was released in August while Shenmue 3 was released in November, the start of the much busier Christmas period.
Click to expand...
Well the gamindustrybiz article posted earlier outright says sales are half not the rank, shenmue HD's rank was actually near the top around 2 or 3 when it came out when I looked it up trying to find more about it. And again I am pretty sure 100K wasnt specifically for for UK's first week but overall first-week sales, but we can definitely rule out them being similar in number.

We probably won't know specifics, but I also dont think this bodes well, I feel like we might only see shenmue 3 cracking around 150K sales overall.
 
We have to keep in mind that most of the Shenmue 3 audience backed the KS, so if you have 9k backers in the UK or 4k backers in Spain or 25k backers in the US not everybody body is going to also buy a retail copy. Also, not even a week from release and the drama train is full non stop, whatever
 
Sales figures are worrying and we can cover up in anyway possible but the truth is if the sales are #6 in japan and #17 in UK on physical sales... this would also be approximate to our position of the total sales...

Essentiallly we are not likely to be debuting in Top 5 of charts despite being a new game which is not great

however this was expected given most fans ordered 4 years ago rather than in last week
 
jsh020 said:
Well the gamindustrybiz article posted earlier outright says sales are half not the rank, shenmue HD's rank was actually near the top around 2 or 3 when it came out when I looked it up trying to find more about it. And again I am pretty sure 100K wasnt specifically for for UK's first week but overall first-week sales, but we can definitely rule out them being similar in number.

We probably won't know specifics, but I also dont think this bodes well, I feel like we might only see shenmue 3 cracking around 150K sales overall.
Click to expand...
You need to stop treating gamindustry.biz as a reliable sources. They are prone to editorialising like every other gaming website and often display the worst excesses you'd also find on Destructoid or Kotaku. Even their reporting of the sales charts are a matter of interpretation, since they haven't posted hard numbers in years. So as far as I'm concerned physical sales of Shenmue 3 are doing great for week 1 if they can still rank in the top 20 and match a consistent seller like Football manager.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top