Shenmue I and II Had ~100,000 Unique Players on PS4

Ceej

Ceej

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How do we know this? Source.
How was this calculated? More info here.
Sony recently launched "My PS4 Life" allowing players to share some stats of their gaming experience.
Besides other numbers, they also disclose the exact number of players who received some trophy in some game. Combined with the % of people who obtained the trophy (this data is available for every game on the PlayStation website), we can estimate the total number of players in this game.

Say, 1,142,392 players earned the "Cradle" trophy in No Man's Sky. And on playstation.com they also reveal that 28,9% of all players got this trophy. Simple math: the total number of people who have played No Man's Sky on PS4 = 1,142,392 * 100% / 28,9% = 3,952,913.
The same trick can be done with every PlayStation 4 game - you just need to find a video where it's someone's rarest trophy. But better not too rare - 0.1% share doesn't give a good estimate.
Note: the number of players who have earned the trophy is not updated online, Sony probably took it somewhere between 20 November and 4 December. So it won't say much about recently released games.
P.S. About 3.5 months ago the number of players in God of War was calculated in exactly the same way when developers revealed the number of players who got the Platinum trophy. Sony must have overlooked that.
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In case you're wondering how this stacks up to other titles:

Most Players: GTA V - 51,700,000
Least Players: VVVVVV - 28,800

Shenmue I and II had 106,000 unique players (anyone that played Shenmue II would have Shenmue I, so we're only using the amount of players for the first game) putting it in league with games like Hitman GO and The Talos Principle.

NOTE: This list *is not* exhaustive and only includes 98 games so far.
 
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Shouldn't we only focus on Shenmue I for the accurate HD collection numbers?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems like the 48,200 players who played Shenmue 2 are from the same pool of 106,000 who enjoyed the first game to the point of giving the sequel a chance.
 
punkmanced said:
Shouldn't we only focus on Shenmue I for the accurate HD collection numbers?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems like the 48,200 players who played Shenmue 2 are from the same pool of 106,000 who enjoyed the first game to the point of giving the sequel a chance.
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Right, if you're estimating sales numbers you're correct. I'll edit the post for clarity.
 
Thats quite a positive start and I'd suspect that across all 3 formats Shenmue has done around 200k-250k sales thus far.
 
I think the amount of fans who bought multiple copies but only count as one player might bump up the sales figures a little bit.
 
KidMarine said:
I think the amount of fans who bought multiple copies but only count as one player might bump up the sales figures a little bit.
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Of course, but if we're going to that micro level of detail we'd also have to account for homes that have multiple players using a single copy (or services such as Gamefly and Redbox). It's probably best to stick to the ballpark range and not worry about accounting for those irregular scenarios.
 
Judging from the intitial Kickstarter backers number, I'd say there could be a couple ten thousand more physical copies which have been sold to hardcore Shenmue fans and collectors. I bought a bunch of copies, basically each regional version for each respective system and that doesn't even put me in the camp of the crazy Shenmue fans.

So for the PS4 alone, there's four regional versions (Japan, Asia, Europe, US) plus the JAP Limited Edition.
 
The site says "These numbers are about 3-4 weeks old...Thus not accurate for recently released games at all."

So maybe it doesn't include an accurate representation of the JP sales?

That could be the difference between 200k and 250k total. For what it's worth (probably not much) VGChartz puts the PS4 version closer to 160k, not including JP sales.
 
Not bad. I’d like to see some sales data on originals vs re-releases (as opposed to remakes) It’d defo go some way to calculating how successful it is. There’d obviously be some discrepancies due to time frames and whether or not you’d consider a former or timed exclusive being released on another console as a re-release, but I’m sure we could read between the lines if we had a fuller picture.
 
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