Shenmue I & II HD sales data

So how much did S1 and S2 sell on each system? Can someone quote me so that i can come back and see your comment. Thanks
 
So in conclusion vgchartz is unreliable but given we know it is no 2 in the chart and they would know the normal amount of sales for each place then it's about right. :)
 
VGChartz isn't a reliable source of accurate sales data, but even if they're somewhere in the ballpark, 100k on consoles seems like a decent start. If the PC version sold similarly to the Xbox version (assuming PS4 is the biggest seller by a fair margin), and Japanese sales are in line with other territories, you're looking at (an estimated) 150k. Then, if you throw in low-ball average weekly sales of 5,000 copies from now till the end of the year, it becomes closer to 200k+ by January.

With Shenmue III launching next year, sales should continue to slowly trickle in, with a big uptick in July-Aug. Based on these dubious calculations, I can see the re-releases selling between 300,000 and 500,000, depending on the success of Shenmue III.
 
I have also been trying to find a solid sales figure, but from what I have been able to find, scattered here and there it sounds like it has been decent, as soon as I find a hard sales figure I will try to post here.
 
Pretty solid numbers for the Japan release:

Software Sales (followed by lifetime sales)

  1. [NSW] Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! / Let’s Go, Eevee! (Bundle Editions Included) (Nintendo, 11/16/18) – 162,467 (823,707)
  2. [PS4] Battlefield V (Electronic Arts, 11/20/18) – 110,653 (New)
  3. [PS4] Disaster Report 4 Plus: Summer Memories (Granzella, 11/22/18) – 42,272 (New)
  4. [PS4] Shenmue I & II (Limited Edition Included) (Sega, 11/22/18) – 37,529 (New)
  5. [NSW] Super Mario Party (Nintendo, 10/05/18) – 24,450 (370,077)

https://gematsu.com/2018/11/media-create-sales-11-19-18-11-25-18
 
Counting digital, which isn't really tracked to my knowledge, I'm going to say 150k-200k worldwide thus far sold across all regions of launch.

That's a reasonable assessment and a cool $4.5-6 million, give or take depending on losses taken when sale discounts were active.

Very respectable for a 20 year old franchise.
 
Valascaziel said:
Counting digital, which isn't really tracked to my knowledge, I'm going to say 150k-200k worldwide thus far sold across all regions of launch.

That's a reasonable assessment and a cool $4.5-6 million, give or take depending on losses taken when sale discounts were active.

Very respectable for a 20 year old franchise.
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There’s a lot more take than give, unfortunately.

You have to factor in development costs (including the time and money spent on the failed remake), production costs, distribution costs and trade prices (places like Amazon and GameStop didn’t give the publisher anywhere near the full $30 recommended retail price of the game).

Looking at how quick some shops were to discount the game, I’m guessing retailers probably paid somewhere in the region of $15-$20 per physical copy.

That gives us about $2.5m generated through sales. Factor in printing costs and worldwide distribution and you’re probably looking at about $2.4m.

Then there’s marketing/advertising and post production work (the patches which continue to be released post release and the continued development time in the run up to the JP release). Sega really cheaped out here (a few poorly edited videos on Twitter was about all I saw), so I expect we’re probably only looking at about $200,000 (the bulk of which probably went to Sony and Microsoft as patch costs).

It’s difficult to say how long the game was in development prior to release, but I’d guess that they had a team of at least fifteen people working on it for at least one year (based on the renders released of the remaster).

It seems that D3T pay their programmers around £27,000 per year (to be fair, I’m basing this on one programmer there that shared their salary, so this could be lower or higher than average - but it’s all we have to go on as their archived job adverts don’t talk numbers) - so we’re looking at a minimum of £405,000 (assuming that £27,000 is about average) which equates to just over half a million dollars.

That leaves us with around $1,700,000 in theoretical profit - but I’d be very surprised if significantly more time and money wasn’t spent on development.

I expect the game to make Sega around $1m at best and wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had actually made a loss due to the botched attempt at a remake (the decision to Axe the UK team may have come as a result of this).
 
Here's a secret:

It would've sold the same had they released it completely glitch-free and would've probably cost them even more money.

Not what anyone wants to hear and I'm not excusing Sega for not releasing a perfect port, but it's the truth
 
SEGA have said they're surprised and impressed by the sales figures, but I'm sure some guy on the Internet who doesn't know the number of sales or the amount spent on development knows better. Come on now.
 
KidMarine said:
SEGA have said they're surprised and impressed by the sales figures...
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Link? I remember comments based on preorders, but solid preorders on a cult favourite do not necessarily equate to great sales.

@tomboz We know the max team size was 10 people. We also know d3t received the Shenmue archive from SEGA 3 years ago but have no idea how long it took them to "ramp up" dev resources, which makes estimating dev costs very difficult.

However, considering what we've seen of the cancelled remake, I agree with your rough estimate -- I'd be shocked if they spent less than £400,000 on the entire project. My gut feeling (based only on the vague info we have right now) is that the game will be profitable at ~200k sold, but won't really be a huge success for SEGA. Thankfully there should be a good tail on sales well into next year due to Shenmue III.
 
According to VG Charts, who I know can be very much called into question, up until October 20th Shenmue HD had done 150k sales on ps4 and 50k on Xbox.

Assuming a degree of leeway that's still quite healthy and there's no tracking on digital sales and the same on pc. I see no reason why 250k-350k couldn't have been hit especially with Japan sales starting off so well. Profit should have been make.

I'd love to see some official numbers but this might be the best we get.
 
KidMarine said:
SEGA have said they're surprised and impressed by the sales figures, but I'm sure some guy on the Internet who doesn't know the number of sales or the amount spent on development knows better. Come on now.
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Without knowing what their expectations were prior to launch it’s impossible to gauge whether them being impressed is really all that impressive.

If they launched the game expecting 1,000 sales, then 5,000 would be both surprising and impressive. If they prepared themselves for a $1m loss after the D3T debacle and only lost $10k, they may be impressed or surprised.

Their lukewarm attitude towards the IP over the past 20 years and their decision to pull the plug on the partial remake suggests to me that they really weren’t expecting all that much interest and so I don’t read too much into their remarks until they release figures.

I’m sorry that you didn’t agree with my estimate for production costs. Would you prefer it if I just imagined a makebelieve world where magical fairies poop out fully developed games allowing publishers and developers to have a 100% profit margin on all games?

I suppose I should have known better really. What on earth was I thinking starting a discussion about sales in a thread dedicated to talking about sales?
 
tomboz said:
Without knowing what their expectations were prior to launch it’s impossible to gauge whether them being impressed is really all that impressive.

If they launched the game expecting 1,000 sales, then 5,000 would be both surprising and impressive. If they prepared themselves for a $1m loss after the D3T debacle and only lost $10k, they may be impressed or surprised.

Their lukewarm attitude towards the IP over the past 20 years and their decision to pull the plug on the partial remake suggests to me that they really weren’t expecting all that much interest and so I don’t read too much into their remarks until they release figures.

I’m sorry that you didn’t agree with my estimate for production costs. Would you prefer it if I just imagined a makebelieve world where magical fairies poop out fully developed games allowing publishers and developers to have a 100% profit margin on all games?

I suppose I should have known better really. What on earth was I thinking starting a discussion about sales in a thread dedicated to talking about sales?
Click to expand...

I'm going to take your estimates (up them a bit) and apply them to my assumptions on sales, just as a bit of analysis really.

$15 for retailers to get stock per game (allows for currency fluctuations)

Copies sold 250k.

So 15×250,000 = $3,750,000

I reckon printing and distribution came in at $200k
Marketing: I'm saying $500k due to the promotion in Japan as well as the western promotion.

That's $700k costs to facilitate release. Leaving $3.05m dollars.

It's the dev costs that I'm not sure on. If I estimate $2m dollars given the work on the canned remake as well then there's $1.05m profit.

Using my upper sales figures of 350k at $15 a game = $5.25m - costs at $2.7m = $2,550,000 which is healthy considering it was a dead IP.

Of course it's all guesswork. Sega seem to have got behind the franchise a bit more so who knows.

Until we see actual figures from all outlets etc we won't know.
 
spud1897 said:
I'm going to take your estimates (up them a bit) and apply them to my assumptions on sales, just as a bit of analysis really.

$15 for retailers to get stock per game (allows for currency fluctuations)

Copies sold 250k.

So 15×250,000 = $3,750,000

I reckon printing and distribution came in at $200k
Marketing: I'm saying $500k due to the promotion in Japan as well as the western promotion.

That's $700k costs to facilitate release. Leaving $3.05m dollars.

It's the dev costs that I'm not sure on. If I estimate $2m dollars given the work on the canned remake as well then there's $1.05m profit.

Using my upper sales figures of 350k at $15 a game = $5.25m - costs at $2.7m = $2,550,000 which is healthy considering it was a dead IP.

Of course it's all guesswork. Sega seem to have got behind the franchise a bit more so who knows.

Until we see actual figures from all outlets etc we won't know.
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I can’t say that I’ve seen too much over here in the way of marketing, but to be fair, I mainly consume western media as my Japanese is god awful.

Your figures probably aren’t too far off though (although we both forgot to take the higher profit margin in digital sales into consideration) and you’re right that $2.5m would be a nice little profit. Given what went on in development though, I think Sega would have been happy enough not to have made a loss.

I’m not sure the overall sales figures are as high as you think. Sega clearly have some indication how many units have sold and I think had they broken the 250k mark they would have been keen to spread the word.

I think the Japanese release may push it past that number though if it has another strong week this week.
 
tomboz said:
Without knowing what their expectations were prior to launch it’s impossible to gauge whether them being impressed is really all that impressive.

If they launched the game expecting 1,000 sales, then 5,000 would be both surprising and impressive. If they prepared themselves for a $1m loss after the D3T debacle and only lost $10k, they may be impressed or surprised.

Their lukewarm attitude towards the IP over the past 20 years and their decision to pull the plug on the partial remake suggests to me that they really weren’t expecting all that much interest and so I don’t read too much into their remarks until they release figures.

I’m sorry that you didn’t agree with my estimate for production costs. Would you prefer it if I just imagined a makebelieve world where magical fairies poop out fully developed games allowing publishers and developers to have a 100% profit margin on all games?

I suppose I should have known better really. What on earth was I thinking starting a discussion about sales in a thread dedicated to talking about sales?
Click to expand...
I think your point about the game selling 'poorly' because of the botched state of the release is your most objectionable point. These reissues/nostalgia releases sell because of nostalgia and reputation, not because of the pristine state of the new code. I don't think the state of release affected sales whatsoever and most new people didn't notice 99% of the bugs we noticed.
 
tomboz said:
I’m not sure the overall sales figures are as high as you think. Sega clearly have some indication how many units have sold and I think had they broken the 250k mark they would have been keen to spread the word.
Click to expand...

Haha this could well be true. You're likely right that the JP sales will push it over the 250k Mark. If it's already there then fantastic.
 
mjqjazzbar said:
I think your point about the game selling 'poorly' because of the botched state of the release is your most objectionable point. These reissues/nostalgia releases sell because of nostalgia and reputation, not because of the pristine state of the new code. I don't think the state of release affected sales whatsoever and most new people didn't notice 99% of the bugs we noticed.
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I’m a little confused, as nowhere have I said that I believed that the botched state of the release impacted sales. I do actually think that’s the case to some degree and have spoken to a few people that didn’t buy it after hearing that it was unplayable at launch, but I haven’t mentioned that in this thread.

If you’re referring to ‘the D3T debacle’, I’m talking about the time and money pissed away attempting to remake the game. I’m guessing that around one year’s worth of development was completely wasted and a lot of money along with it.
 
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