Shenmue I & II HD sales data

Ghost_Messiah said:
Yeah I was very disappointed last night to see that Shenmue didn't chart in the US via NPD. I didn't post because I didn't want to be the bearer of bad news. I did ask in the thread on ResetERA about it and apparently Shenmue having limited days on sale in terms of NPD's tracking (final days of August) in conjunction with NPD tracking revenue and not unit sales with Shenmue's re-release being a budget title obliterated its chances. As in, the game could have still sold well, it's just the way that NPD records its data via revenue means that Shenmue didn't stand a chance. At a guess it probably mirrored its performance in the UK and Australia, it's just that NPD won't reveal true performance based on the way they determine their chart.

I think if it hits a million eventually Sega will inevitably let us know, and shout something like that from the rooftops.
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Damn that sucks. So we have no real idea how many copies it sold. I'm sure if the KS had about 70,000 backers this must have sold atleast around that amount if not more with people getting multiple copies on different systems and digital. But that is still guess work....

Do we know what sort of sales number this would need to be considered atleast a success to SEGA?

I had a few people on my PSN say they might get it but none of them did in the end, due to the other games coming out in the following weeks (SNK Heriones/DQ11/Spider-Man/Kiwami 2) of its release and not having any previous investement in Shenmue.
I guess every Shenmue nut will need to start gifting this out at every chance and promoting it when on sale.
I plan on getting a steam copy for myself when a sale hits and gifting that version out to a few steam buddies for X-mas/B-day. So that they can atleast try it if they want and maybe make them give S3 a look.
 
Tosh said:
there is no way that the Shenmue HD version could keep up with those sales numbers. that would be insane.
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I don’t think it’s unrealistic to expect Shenmue to compete at all. Most of those games have been out for more than one year and are verging on market saturation. The number of copies they are selling these days is probably incredibly low.

The real issues are the lack of any meaningful marketing and the poor job done porting the games. With those things in mind, I suppose it’s understandable; but had it been done correctly, Shenmue could have charted.

I bet Sega are kicking themselves for their pricing strategy now. It’s looking like the vast majority of people who bought the game were already series fans who would have been prepared to pay full price. It seems casual gamers have little interest in buying broken games regardless of how cheap they are!
 
i think most of the fans overestimate the possible success of Shenmue.
i mean, look at that list again - Far Cry, Detroit Become Human, Horizon Zero Dawn,
GTA, God of War, CoD, Monster Hunter, Zelda ...

those are the modern triple A top titles that most gamers have on their want to buy list.
if we are talking about sales numbers, then those are the titles with the golden crown.
those games sell more than 1 mil copies in 5 days easily at the start.
a simple small budget remaster has absolutely no chance there.

as i said, in the past Sega didnt even tell us the sales numbers for the Yakuza games in the west.
they only told us the numbers for Yakuza 6 because it was the title with the biggest success.
and it wasnt even super duper extreme - they were super happy about 800.000+ sold copies worldwide.

so do we really think that the Shenmue HD remaster could compete with those titles on the list?
especially if you include the problem that the list is only about money and Shenmue is by far the cheapest game on that list.

even if those big titles are not the newest, it just needs a little discount price in the big stores
and thats enough to boost them way more than any normal game.

we are probably talking about 2+ mil copies (full price) sold to appear on the lowest ranks of that list.
and i think Shenmue HD is not able to do that. its not that i want to harm the product or anything,
i'm just trying to see it in a realistic way.

if they measure success with the amount of money made,
then how could a 25-30 dollar Shenmue outdo those other titles? i think thats pretty much impossible.
 
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That's a bit disappointing it didn't chart at all in the US but keep in mind it only had one third of August to compete. Still think Sega's pricing policy was correct. If they would have priced this at 60 $/Euros, the fact alone would have caused a massive backlash against Shenmue. Some no-frills port of almost 20 year-old games for 60 bucks? No way people would have had that.

Also at the current price tag, gaming media and the general public largely were ok to "look past" the bugs in these re-releases. If they would have priced it at full price, it would have created a huge amount of criticism, and rightly so, given the gargantuan amount of bugs in the re-releases.
 
Tosh said:
i think most of the fans overestimate the possible success of Shenmue.
i mean, look at that list again - Far Cry, Detroit Become Human, Horizon Zero Dawn,
GTA, God of War, CoD, Monster Hunter, Zelda ...


so do we really think that the Shenmue HD remaster could compete with those titles on the list?
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In a head to head battle assuming both are released at the same time, of course not.

The thing is though, the top selling game in the UK for the week ending August 11th sold just over 5,000 units and to make top ten in the US for the week ending August 18th, a game needed to sell around 12,000 units.

Granted these figures are pre Shenmue release (that’s all I can find in the way of the most recent unit figures), but unless sales of these year old games suddenly skyrocketed - Shenmue performed pretty terribly.

I don’t expect millions of sales - but a few thousand in the UK and 12K in the US seems very achievable (especially given the price).
 
I thought this was a limited release anyway? If the budget was small, it could potentially be a modest success. Once again, I think some fans overestimate how much of a seller Shenmue can be. It has, and always will be, niche.

I don't buy the "bugs killed the sales" theory. If anything, diehard fans (who bought it anyway) are the ones who care about that. Many casuals didn't notice or don't care.
 
staplepuffs27 said:
I thought this was a limited release anyway? If the budget was small, it could potentially be a modest success. Once again, I think some fans overestimate how much of a seller Shenmue can be. It has, and always will be, niche.
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Yeah, I think it was probably a modest success and was profitable for Sega. It sold pretty well when it first came out, but now it seems like sales have slowed down a lot. It also seems like 90% of the people who bought the games are fans (which was to be expected).
 
I still have never seen the game on display once in any shop in San Francisco. It wasn't an FPS or racer so it didn't get to be shown. Most of the employees who stock shelves probably can't even pronounce Shenmue.
 
Taarabt said:
Source

Global first week sales are in 87,676 were sold. Great result

http://www.vgchartz.com
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That's only for the PS4 version. If you combine that with the numbers for the Xbox One version, the number jumps to 107,971. This number also doesn't include Steam or digital console versions. I bought the digital version on Xbox One. I'll bet the true number is closer to around 175,000.
 
I thought VG Chartz was BS, but maybe they’ve gotten better?
 
I would like to know hoy they got the sells info, I think the numbers are not bad but would be great to know how they operate in countries that does not make public the sales data etc
 
Kyo_JP said:
I would like to know hoy they got the sells info, I think the numbers are not bad but would be great to know how they operate in countries that does not make public the sales data etc
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They are very clear on their methodology if you look into it.

It would be fair to say that their figures are far from accurate, but given they measure all games by the same parameters, the figures should be fairly accurate comparatively.
 
vgchartz.com is not a reliable source. they dont have any proven references, you can clearly see that some of their
numbers are totally wrong because they dont match up with the official numbers from the publisher,
vgchartz claims to use "verifying methods" which includes numbers that not even Sony or Microsoft could tell us,
they are on the Wikipedia list of unreliable sources.

all they do is estimate sales numbers. they get their numbers from some retail shops
(pre orders, how many copies shipped etc)
and based on that, they estimate the numbers for all shops.
they dont even tell us from which shops those numbers they are using are.

so vgchartz is like a 1 month weatherforecast, it can be totally accurate, it also can be totally inaccurate.
 
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