Konami Need To Figure Out What To Do With LovePlus

Last week, Konami released New LovePlus+ for the Nintendo 3DS. The dating-sim sold 31,258 copies in its first week on store shelves, which is a rather low figure for a franchise like LovePlus, going by the sales of past games in the series.

The very first LovePlus game, released on the Nintendo DS in 2009, sold just 46,426 copies in its first week. A year later, Konami released an updated version of the game—LovePlus+ on the Nintendo DSi—which debuted at 84,364 copies.

Then, in 2011, Konami released New LovePlus, the first LovePlus game for the Nintendo 3DS, which sold 104,969 copies in week 1, marking another increase in launch week sales for the franchise—its highest opening yet.

Unfortunately, New LovePlus also suffered from a variety of bugs and glitches, which were met with complaints from consumers. To make matters worse, some of these bugs weren’t patched until months later.

Given the low sales of New LovePlus+, one can assume that a number of players of New LovePlus have not returned to buy the new game. There’s a good possibility that their experience with New LovePlus was less than positive, and that this soured them on the series.

In an interview with Famitsu last year, producer Akira Uchida acknowledged that New LovePlus had issues, even aside from the bugs.

“With the previous game, a lot of people said it had gotten harder to play after we reworked the gameplay system and interface,” Uchida said at the time. “We are reconsidering the entire game here, including rolling back on some of those new features. In addition to that, though, I’ve written a massive amount of new story scenarios for each of the three heroines.”

But perhaps it just wasn’t enough. Another possible reason for the low opening week sales of New LovePlus+ is that Konami have, for whatever reason, refrained from adding more dateable characters to the game. The original three mascots—Nene, Manaka and Rinko—are still the only characters you can date in the game, despite the LovePlus series having been around for five years now.

Sales data from Media Create.