PS5 Finally Takes Control of Japanese Charts, As Forspoken Flops

I expected this headline to call for Flopspoken.

Forspoken was one of those middle pitched games that was too western for Japan and too Japanese for the west (in terms of average gamers).

10k for Disgaea 7 on Switch, PS versions didn't even make top 10. That's pretty bad.

Edit: Actually I'm underselling it, that's terrible. I know Disgaea 6 wasn't exactly popular, but jeez.

@ShogunRok is Disgaea really that big? Ive tried a few and they have never caught me. Then again it was on the switch which is a horrible experience

@Matroska Forspoken does feel a bit weird in its identity. Like it was written and conceptualised by the West and then made in Japan without any real communication between the two.

@Rmg0731 Nah, Disgaea's never been big, but these sales numbers suggest it's actually shrinking, which is never good.

I think the series' peak was back on the PS2 when it was still new and weird. It's just never been able to progress beyond that, sadly, even though many of the sequels are well regarded.

Don’t know if I’ll call Forspoken a flop just yet. But it’s certainly not gonna be an immense GOTY contending game. I didn’t mind the gameplay but despised the banter between Frey and Cuff. That’s what put me off the game.

The switch sales always slow down when there's no new major games releasing, when Kirby releases this month the sales will go up again and then in May they will sky rocket when zelda hits the shelves, which i'm hoping for a zelda limited edition OLED.

Nice to see playstation getting back on top for a while, it seems like Sony are going all out lately, bigger and better advertising, more steady levels of stock, has the VR2 coming this month and some great jrpgs this year, so the momentum should continue.

Xbox on the other hand will slowly go down hill more and more, struggling to hit 1000 console sales per week since October, still a lot of Japanese games skipping the console and now they are increasing the price of both their consoles in the region.

@ShogunRok the list order has an error, ps5 digital is at place 2, it should be 5th.

@darkswabber Thanks, we've fixed it!

Forspoken will be forgotten

They seemed to target Forspoken to a certain demographic and said demographic just isn't buying it. Doesn't help that the game is mediocre at best but still, terrible games can sell pretty well if they target the right audience. This audience just doesn't buy.

I still can not for the life of me figure out the current Japan PS market. They keep buying hardware and not buying games. I'd just love to figure out where all these PS5s are going in Japan!

@ATaco What demographic were they targeting though? I think they were TRYING to tie it to the Marvel/Spiderman demographic. I don't know that they actually targeted it though...

Other than the bland open world, problematic parkour, bad performance, and questionable writing, I think the biggest problem with the game is precisely that nobody can answer the question "Who is this for?" There's no real identity to it, just concepts with "hello fellow kids" writing.

@ShogunRok Yeah Disgaia is pitiful. It's niche, but that's a whole new level of bad. It's so bad it makes Forspoken look good, and that's REALLY bad.

Apart from anything else, Switch physical games are much smaller than PS5 physical games. That's genuinely why I'm much more cautious about buying a physical PS5 game over a Switch one.

Also Switch games rarely get good sales (and as a result keep their resell value better). It makes more sense to buy it physically and potentially sell it on. I don't see the PS5 ever seriously challenging the software chart, even when it's install base gets much higher.

@KaijuKaiser Probably just further strengthening their bond and relationship with Square

@NEStalgia If you also get a PS+ sub, that's a bunch of good PS4 games you may not have played. The monthly ''free'' stuff, and of course the more expensive tiers have more available games to play. And of course digital sales. The game sales don't reflect games sold in bundles either. You can get a ton of games before ever thinking about buying your first physical copy.

On Nintendo... fewer digital sales, less storage space. Maybe people are more inclined to go physical over there?

@get2sammyb Could you not lead with the headline

"PS4 outselling Xbox Series X"?

I'd love to see the comments section then 😅

@ShogunRok Crazy when Disgaea 6 sold 23.5k on Switch and 15.7 on PS4 in the first week just two years ago. I saw someone that analyses a lot of the Japanese sales side of things say that Sony had the marketing rights for Disgaea 7 in Japan and might have affected sales as they would have mistaken it for being a PS exclusive. Even so that's still a big decrease in sales for the Switch version, and the PS4 and PS5 versions must have sold at max 6K or under

@Octane Yeah, @Ralizah and I were going back and forth about it with last weeks list. I was thinking it could be all about Japan embracing subscriptions and going all in on Plus and not buying games much as well. Though I was also wondering if it could be a lot of either "scalper" resale or maybe more likely China export despite the console "officially" being available there in whatever quantities it is, they've long imported from Japan and I'm sure the supply chain in there still exists to import them.

Digital sales don't factor in, but this is Japan, they really haven't fully adopted digital like much of the world.

Any list that doesn’t take into account digital sales needs to be taken with a pinch of salt now surely?

When you combine the SKU’s it’s an even narrower race, but I’m glad to see some life in the ol’ PlayStation ecosystem in Japan. It will be interesting to see if we get a bigger uptick when we get all the other games that Square-Enix and Capcom have coming this year. Surely Japan will jump on board all the Final Fantasy hype.

@Matroska it is also just a really mediocre game.

@Th3solution how is it more narrow than the 10k or so the article states?

Yo wtf are those Disgaea 7 numbers? Didn't this series have a comfortable following on Playstation in Japan? That version didn't even chart, and the Switch version sold pathetically as well.

Kinda ironic, considering the explicitly Japanese theming of this entry.

Hopefully it sells better in NA.

@NEStalgia In fairness, Disgaea games would have an immensely lower budget than Forspoken. Depending on how much money went into its development and marketing, it might still end up being the bigger flop overall.

Of course, Square-Enix is likely much more capable of absorbing a loss like this than NIS is with Disgaea. Considering there have already been bankruptcy concerns among fans, this doesn't look good.

Also, out of interest, what happened to SplooshDmg? I was tagged by him earlier, but I can't see any of his posts now. Not even on Pure Xbox.

@stvevan Oops, I just scanned and then went straight to the chart, not realizing Sammy did the math for us.

@Ralizah I think Disgaia kind of wore out its welcome. It's niche to begin with, and it's had so many entries and all of them are kind of the same, plus the horrible Switch performance, I think it may have been one Switch-era entry too many. PS not charting, and PS having the marketing rights though....wowzer.

Sploosh...lol.....he does that. He decides he's had too much social media, and deletes his whole account and all his posts otherwise he'll be compelled to log in. Then a month later he comes back like nothing ever happened.....

Thanks to him doing that, half of the running meme on Jim and Neil we had at one point, and the site bringing back the dead article a year later with an update, it looked like I was ranting by myself and I had multiple people block me once....

This time, he vanished mid-conversation on me. It was the fanboy wars on the PS profits threads that broke him this time I think.

@KaijuKaiser could just be a give and take, we do a deal with Final Fantasy, Square see writing on the wall with Forspoken and ask Sony to throw them a bone there as a sony exclusive also gets the game more attention. Simple business

PS5 install base in Japan will be the the same 8%/10% of the total base like PS4 was.

Japanese developers understand Sony is the gateway to the West regardless what their hardware sales are in japan. So they keep supporting it - that is really all that matters.

@NEStalgia All of the other Disgaea releases on Switch have run well. Footage suggests the same is true of Disgaea 7 also. No idea what happened with Disgaea 6 to make it run like that.

You're probably not wrong about the market saturation element, though. On Switch/PS4, we have... Disgaea 1, Disgaea 4, Disgaea 5, Disgaea 6, and now Disgaea 7. That's a LOT of Disgaea on the same consoles.

I was hoping for a Disgaea 2 remaster, as it's my favorite entry in the series, but I'm guessing NIS will back off the series for a bit if the game also flops in the West. :/

Ah, good to know. I never understood deleting your account like that. Granted, I also have no issue whatsoever disengaging from conversations. Especially now that the ignore feature is a thing, and I can put people I'm arguing with in the memory hole for a few days while I cool off.

@Ralizah I probably follow the series more than many and just kind of assumed it would run bad like 6 until you said that. I can't imagine that helped sales... 6 was bad. Rune Factory 5 was bad....

But the saturation....if you played 1, 4, 5, 6 or a combination of them you've probably had enough Disgaea for a while. On top of that, recently we have Mario + Rabbids 2, FE: Toothpaste-chan, and Triangle Strategy....it's not just Disgaea oversaturation but SRPG oversaturation in general on Switch. With Advance Wars still on the way.

Yeah Sploosh is definitely....unique in that regard. I don't think it's so much about getting peeved at particular commenters so much as just getting too engaged in posting in general and for whatever reason the only way for him not to compulsively keep logging in is to delete the entire account and all it's history. It drives us regulars that chat with him a lot up a wall (and gets us blocked by others in the aftermath ) but....that's just how he rolls... He's also a huge Genshin Impact fan, so compulsive addiction's definitely his thing.

@Mikey856 In Japan? How can it last if it never started? Worse, they just raised console prices....in Japan only.....a market it doesn't sell in. They're obviously not very intent on trying to take that market, which to be fair just makes sense, but it's a weird way to do it.

Wait so it’s the only none Switch game on the list, and it’s a flop?

@Mikey856 I did have a little chuckle. Only because I’ve heard so much from Xbox fans about how Japan is going to switch to Xbox because Sony doesn’t care about the Japanese market anymore.

Wow, those Xbox sales 🫢

@HeroYoshiko It's launch week for the game though and most of those Switch games on the list are ancient.... 30k launch sales is pretty bad. Not Disgaia 7 bad, but a bad launch in Japan for sure.

Getting their PS5's before Final Fantasy!

It's gonna blow everything away.

@NEStalgia And Redemption Reapers. And three Front Mission remakes. And the recent port of Tactics Ogre.

Switch is literally an SRPG haven.

“Finally Takes Control” - okay, calm down Push Square.

It’s great news for Sony but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. They’ll need to sell more consoles than the PS3, PS4 and PS5 combined from this point forward without Switch selling another unit and they still won’t have overtaken the Switch.

They are not going to take control of Japan unless they release a new portable console.

@NEStalgia Forspoken's target demographic was Twitter, Twitter minorities loves begging for minorities to be the protagonist in games (black, feminist, buff + lesbian), but then said games flop like in this case.

@ShogunRok Disgaea 7 isn’t doing so hot & that’s mostly due to Disgaea 6 being terrible & a switch exclusive launch for multiple years.

You reap what you sow. I’ll buy it when it comes over here, but NIS p*** off a fan base that grew up with it.

@ATaco Who is "this audience" you keep referring to?

Unless digital download sales are eventually taking into account, then it's meaningless to about sales figures, because we're not getting the full picture. And to call Forspoken a "flop" without having all the sales numbers is, respectfully, dumb.

@Ear_wiG Xbox Don’t and won’t ever sell in Japan. Which mean’s they aren’t a monopoly nor able to buy the gaming market out.

@Fight_Teza_Fight Disgaea 6 was never exclusive in Japan.

For japan these days a 30k opening is ok.
The real market for the game is the west... where it will likely flop.

I really hope Disgaea 7 has some legs. I love the series too much to see it wither away and die, especially on what seems to be a quality release. The low numbers are somewhat baffling given the explicit Japan theming of this entry.

In the West at least, marketing for the game has been slim so far. I don't think this is something they can afford to slack on.

In any case, it's a game I'm massively looking forward to for an international release. Been far too long for the next proper Disgaea. D5 was nearly 8 years ago.

@smellslikejavier Yeah I remember that flop called GTA San Andreas. Most people haven't even heard of it.

@NEStalgia I live and work in Japan. I wondered about that as well. Most people I asked, said they either have or want a PS5 to play Fortnite or Apex. When I pushed the issue, most had no clue what ps5 games were out or coming out.

@Ralizah Yeah, but that certainly didn't set a good stage for yet another Disgaia to sell well...

Plus Ubisoft blaming Mario performing under expectations, and FE: Colgate is naturally doing better but still not overwhelming. There might be SRPG fatigue setting in in general. I know personally I've stopped really buying most of them, I've just binged on the genre so much between switch and 3ds and Vita.

@DominoHurley WOW, That's interesting. And surprising for Japan. I'm sure their mtx is good, but if even Japan of only about the two big f2p games..... Kinda depressing for normal gaming.

@Paramahansa
I'm not fool enough to state it outright. I don't want to shake the beehive.

@Ralizah I mean, clearly not everyone shares my binge psychology but it may well be there - even on sales, I have yet to grab Disgaea 4 and 5 (let alone 6) because after the first one it would still make more sense for me to try 2 and 3, especially since those already do exist in portable form on PSP and Vita. Otherwise, performance hiccups or not, Switch is still the best modern environment for indulging in Disgaea's kind of crazy tactical grindfest - and NIS seems to know it.

Those are the numbers I'd expect for a new PS5 only IP. It's in the upcoming weeks when Forspoken becomes Flopspoken, and it's probably going to drop out next week.

@ATaco When I read your comment, I knew it was something offensive. It's the same type of tripe I see in YouTube comment sections. And I'm sure it's a total coincidence, but I tend to see such remarks whenever the protagonist and main cast are non-male and non-white. "Who are the devs trying to appeal to? That target audience doesn't even play games". So on and so forth...

@AhmadSumadi agreed, awful dialogue. If they somehow fixed that, I'd buy it.

@Paramahansa
Oh the protagonist's gender and color have nothing to do with it...but that's where people usually default to when someone has criticisms. It's like the new saint's row all over again. Though I don't need to say anything, the sales of each game speak for themselves.

@ATaco Oh, I didn't say YOUR criticism was about race or gender. You're not "fool enough" to talk about it. But let's be honest, the reason people "default" to that is for good reason. All you need do is head to the comment section of any game with a non-male or non-white protagonist and cast and you'll see. Whether that's the Last of Us 2, Forspoken, Saints Row, etc.

And sales doesn't mean that audience isn't buying those games, it could be that audience isn't as big... Yet.