This Week In Sales: Phantasy Star Nova Takes A Dive

Period: The week of November 24th – November 30th (2014)

Top-seller: Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire (3DS) – 298,613

Nintendo 3DS sales: 19,722 | Tot. sales: 9,686,698

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 15,182 | Tot. sales: 6,737,707

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 22,875 | Tot. sales: 212,771

New Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 48,738 | Tot. sales: 506,121

PlayStation Vita sales: 27,935 | Tot. sales: 3,252,081

Vita TV sales: 1,285 | Tot. sales: 146,200

Wii U sales: 12,496 | Tot. sales: 2,009,513

PlayStation 4 sales: 13,489 | Tot. sales: 822,554

Xbox One sales: 1,237 | Tot. sales: 39,698

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week, Sega released Phantasy Star Nova for the PlayStation Vita in Japan. The game, which is yet another multiplayer-focused title for the Vita, sold 107,313 copies in its first week. Unfortunately, that’s the lowest debut of any multiplayer Phantasy Star game in recent years.

Below is a look at how the precursor to Nova, the Phantasy Star Portable series, performed. All three games listed below were released for the PSP:

(2008) Phantasy Star Portable – 341,700

(2009) Phantasy Star Portable 2 – 286,896

(2011) Phantasy Star Portable 2: Infinity – 206,654

In comparison to the aforementioned games, Nova’s 100k debut doesn’t look very good. As to why the game saw such a low debut, there are two theories that come to mind. The first is that a multiplayer Phantasy Star game already exists on Vita in Phantasy Star Online 2. This game is available on PC, Vita and even on smartphones in some form, and is free-to-play. Given how similar Nova looks to PSO2, there’s a good chance the broader audience decided they didn’t need it when they can already play the other game for free.

The other theory is publishers have simply released too many multiplayer-focused action games on Vita too quickly. Over the last few years, the popularity of Monster Hunter has encouraged other developers to create their own multiplayer-focused games where players team up to fight large monsters. On Vita, there are currently six prominent games in this genre: Soul Sacrifice, Soul Sacrifice Delta, Toukiden, Toukiden Kiwami, God Eater 2, and Freedom Wars. All of these games have been released over the span of a year-and-a-half, so the idea that the market for these titles is getting saturated isn’t far-fetched. Think of it as the equivalent of six multiplayer-focused first-person shooters being released in a year, all on the same platform. At some point, they’re going to begin eating into each other’s sales.

Moving on, the other significant release last week was Etrian Odyssey Untold II: The Knight of Fafnir. This game is a Nintendo 3DS remake of Etrian Odyssey II (originally on Nintendo DS), and sold 59,531 copies in its first week. That’s a significantly lower debut than the previous Etrian Odyssey Untold game, which debuted at 88,278 sold.

Why the lower sales? Again, there are a couple of plausible theories worth considering here. The first is that an “Etrian Odyssey” game has already been released his year. Earlier in the year, Atlus released Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, which is for all intents and purposes an Etrian Odyssey game with a Persona skin. It’s also a very satisfying Etrian Odyssey experience, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Etrian fans have already had their fill for the year.

The other reason for the lower sales could be that, three days before Etrian Odyssey Untold II was released, Atlus announced two more Etrian games—Etrian Mystery Dungeon and Etrian Odyssey V—both of which sound like a bigger deal. It’s possible that fans saw the announcement of the two new games and decided to wait for one of those instead… after all, Etrian Mystery Dungeon is just four months away.

On the bright side, hardware sales saw a boost across the board, owing to the approaching holiday season. The next four weeks should be interesting to watch.

The top-20 software sales chart for last week is as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.