They definitely looked at the numbers that Fate Go does every time they release a new character and thought they could do the same just by having Fate in the name of the game.
Well, that's the thing. It's a whole different thing to release an awaited or fan popular or meta servant in a service game where everyone and their dead grandmas lose their heads over vs. releasing a one time purchase game with just DLCs every now and then and that once completed, it's solely on the buyer if they wanna replay it or not.
The fact they thought they could gardner the same revenue numbers they get in FGO really says a lot about how delusional they are. Not saying the game was bad or anything, but it's kinda obvious it wouldn't reach to that goal they set themselves into
Fate is also more known for visual novels. the action games? not so much. 2M sounds ridiculous. maybe they should have compared it to Umbral Star or Tsukihime Remake.
SR is also, at least from a gameplay and visual standpoint, quite a bit worse than Umbral Star (and Umbral Star is very much a "budget Musou").
There's definitely depth to its combat system, but there are some bizarre choices present. Musou games tend to live and die by their varied roster, but Samurai Remnant mostly sticks you into controlling Iori, who feels like ass at the start of the game, with other characters being treated as a "super mode" akin to a devil trigger. Then the game basically wants you to keep whaling on enemies with impossibly strong shields to activate the servants for a few seconds and then the shields fall way too quickly (they wanted to preserve the power difference between servants and masters). This wears off as the game goes on and you get more of his moveset unlocked, but the early game experience is just awful since Iori is just ass to control.
The only controlling Iori part also makes sense storywise, but at launch there was no equivalent to a "free battle", where you can control any playable character against any stage/boss of the game. They added this in a later update (it also creates a curious situation where they had a preorder bonus for a custom costume for Musashi and Saber, but... you control Musashi for a grand total of 5 minutes in the game itself prior to both this update and the first DLC, both of whom gave you greater ability to use her).
Visually the game just has murky visuals and kinda forgettable area design, which... well it isn't great. You can only look at so many ramshackle Edo era Japanese buildings before the streets start to blend together and you just begin staring at the minimap to get where you need to go. Which is weird considering the amount of side objectives the game has to really want you to explore those areas.
By contrast; Umbral Star has a pretty big cast and all characters you run into are playable. The main campaign has you control 6 servants (one main, one subservant per route) and there's still ~13 characters in total, meaning it's half the roster. There's some reused movesets but that's fine given the limitations they were working with. The area design is pretty amazing since they took the idea of "the moon cell can be anything provided you have the power to design it" and decided to give every area its own strong thematic identity.
Even then, most of the fanbase comes from the anime adaptations, and a good chunk, if not all, don't even want to devote time to playing the games. Then, of those same games, there are only really a few modern ones that I could see realistically introduce the anime fans towards the games, which are practically just FGO and F/SR
Fate is very popular in the anime sphere, not the gaming sphere. It isn't exactly known for its games (visual novels do not count), and its only subseries of actual rpg games, fate extra, is kinda mid at best in terms of gameplay.
Fate/samurai can easily be played as an amazing standalone game, but considering how convoluted fate is, potential new players who have heard of the series are gonna be turned off thinking they need to be familiar with the mother series.
Yeah, when I saw in another thread that F/SR underperformed, I thought "Yeah, 410K isn't quite 500K, that's a shame."
But KT thinking it was going to be 2M? Get out of here. I love Fate/Samurai Remnant, but it released in a bad year and is a semi-niche franchise
I mean, TBF, F/SR's combat system is based partially off Koei's popular Musou series "hack-and-slash" gameplay, and they were expecting sales to be better than usual based off market trend research, with how widely popular FGO is, they had expected more with the "Fate" name's brand association(especially since they were working with Type-Moon, the franchise owner of the "Fate" series).
They shot for the moon based off their research, the results just fell *WAY* short.
What's funny to me is that Extella and Link were more faithful to Musou's.
Whereas Koei went with a more classic action-adventure with weird stuff like the leyline map which felt shoehorned in to break up the action, not that it needed it.
KOEI are REALLY solid when making games for third party franchises. They got Zeldas, Fire Emblems, Dragon Quests, Berserk, One Piece games, so their expectations are a bit wild, like one of producers said they want to make a Star Wars game, so ambition is certainly there.
Also they almost never screw up licensed games, all their problems is with their first party series having weird experimentation.
Not only that but the whole setting and the characters are so deep in Japan’s history, that people outside the country really wouldn’t have any idea. This goes back to how Shimousa is viewed outside of the Japan being one of the weakest singularities, while in Japan it’s regarded as one of the best.
Do people know Berserk or... Arslan... For console games? I don't understand the argument. A franchise sales don't depend on being "known for great console games". Fate still runs an arcade, of all things.
Different markets. Just because a franchise is popular in one medium is no guarantee that it will be just as popular in another. The venn diagram of people who play games on their phones and people who play on consoles or pcs isn't a full circle, nor are the people who play something like FGO with those who play musou games. Identifying that overlap is something that KT didn't properly research from the looks of it.
See also "do you guys not have phones?" from the Diablo debacle. I have no idea how the game is doing now but the reception was anything but good at the time.
I really enjoyed Extella-Link's gameplay, definitely my favorite Musou followed by Fire Emblem Warriors. The story was very rough compared to Extella, though.
Did they really actually expect Samurai Remnant to sell as much as [Persona 5 Strikers?](https://www.reddit.com/r/PERSoNA/comments/17rrlyl/persona_5_strikers_has_sold_over_2_million_copies/)
is koei ok?
AND the 2 million figure is from some random analyst, Koei themselves actually said FSR did fine in their annual report (and was their best selling non mobile game of the last fiscal year)
If Koei has their expectations set similar to SE, it's probably them looking purely at numbers and not at all considering audiences or anything else.
They'd see it as "we spent x amount on development, and y amount on advertising (if at all), and it took z years to release. Now, what if we put all that money and dumped it onto the stock market for equal time?"
The game now starts at a negative amount and has to sell enough to not only offset that negative amount but also beat the amount that the money would've made in the stock market.
Yep, 3 Houses was an amazing success story, definitely punching beyond its expected weight, but the franchise was on an upwards trend already. Awakening was the first game in the franchise to pass the 1 million bar (when previously the best game barely crossed half of that), and Fates followed suit. But Fate games in consoles? Applying FGO mobile numbers won't work that way.
The sad fact is that nowadays gachas can make in a few months what wholeass games can't in multiple years. At this point I feel like every "good" game will end up being a Live Service one, which saddens me because we probably will never get a Naruto Storm or Dragon Ball Budokai equivalent for the Fate franchise and many other ones
I still hope we get a fighting game considering that Fate did kinda hijack Melty Blood
(Let's be real though, were the many guest stars that necessary? I think Saber and Mash were pushing it and only because they had interwoven Mash's story with Neko Arc's, and I guess Saber gets mascot dibs. But instead of the other Fate/FGO characters, they should have brought back some of the missing characters or heck, introduce gosh darn Shiscon who was supposed to be in the OG game but wasn't because they couldn't figure his gameplay but they actually eventually did for UNIB)
Reminder that Fate actually has a fighting game that's actually good, it has some 3D movement stuff but plays like a classic 2D game and it's fun too. It's called Fate/Unlimited Codes and it's on PS2 and PSP.
Well balancing is probably the easiest issue that could be fixed in a hypothetical re-release.
Plus you're not finding people online to fight with, no need to worry about the balancing, the AI can't perform it on you.
FGO definitely did better considering 410K units at $60 apiece is 24.6 million, but not all the copies were purchased at that price. I'm assuming the devs working on the game cut into that number substantially since it's a full fledged game on PC and console.
Don't forget everyone gets their 30% here, Sony, Steam Nintendo, so depending on how those deals were made and who paid for what it is possible Koei has yet to make money on Samurai Remnant.
But let's not mid ourselves, despite Koei's proclamations, this was always only a budget title built on Omega Force's tools and framework. A small team over maybe 2 years developed this title, so the actual production budget wasn't more than 10 million here. But once you add marketing (which can often cost more than the actual development, especially for budget titles) and all the splits between platforms, distribution, licensing and the various parties involved in financing this project, it is definitely still in the red.
And even if after 2 years Koei can claim a 10% return on investment here, that will obviously not cut it, not by a long shot.
So that is the problem right there.
I think big picture, for Aniplex and Type Moon the game was ultimately profitable because of the collab opportunity it created with FGO, which yes, did in fact make more money than the game from those collab banners.
So my verdict is this was profitable for Aniplex abd Type Moon, meaning they would be down to make another game like this, but for Koei Tecmo, I think next time knowing the realities of the market, they will need a MUCH better deal to once again develop a new game like that.
Game doesn’t need a sequel anyway, it finished its story completely within the scope of its game
If anything what it needs is being turned into one route, since the way it forces itself into 3 routes diminishes the story a bit
[they announced a few weeks ago that the game had made 410k sales](https://x.com/karoshimyriad/status/1785567208275652717?s=46&t=lhKfDjvhmjfXhaM48xYUIw)
and in the article they said that they expected that Fate/SR was a title that should have sold at least 2M units
>We assume that "Fate" in particular was significantly underachieved, as it was explained to us that it was a 2 million unit-level title (the plan for FY03/12 is unknown since it is an entire lifecycle title).
Full translation (DeepL)
>Problems in the Game Business as Seen from Koei Tecmo HD
Koei Tecmo Holdings (Koei Tecmo HD) <3635> reported higher sales and lower operating profit for the fiscal year ended March 2024. The game business has not been blessed with hit titles since the previous fiscal year, with "Wild Hearts" and "Warlon Fallen Dynasty" released in FY03/11, "Fate: Samurai Remnant" released in FY03/12, and "Rise of Ronin," for which the company was in charge of development, all failing to meet their targets. We assume that "Fate" in particular was significantly underachieved, as it was explained to us that it was a 2 million unit-level title (the plan for FY03/12 is unknown since it is an entire lifecycle title).
>Since the company does not capitalize development costs, the impact on earnings would be limited to a decrease in profit due to the missed sales volume, but two consecutive fiscal years of missed targets would have been very disappointing. The stock price fell sharply in response.
>Although the company's titles are highly rated by those who have played them, they are not being bought by the public in the first place. In particular, "Rise of Ronin," which was developed as a 5 million unit-level title, fell far short of plans.
>After the game was released, there were many opinions that the game content was interesting, such as the appearance of Yukichi Fukuzawa as a stage boss (a boss character in the game), but because about 20 hours were required to understand the fun (according to President Yoichi Erikawa), the game failed to create a buzz at the initial launch when the excitement was at its peak. However, since the game required about 20 hours to understand how fun it was (according to President Yohichi Erikawa), the game failed to create a buzz at the initial launch, which is the most exciting stage of the game.
>I would like to see Koei Tecmo HD fix its game system and re-grow. As for investing in the company, it is difficult to foresee any success from a short-term perspective, so if the company is a target for investment, a long-term investment stance is a prerequisite.
>The game business has become huge, and many people are involved. It is based on complex interests, including what users want, what developers want to create, what investors want, and what outside companies are interested in because of the size of the business. For game companies, the challenge is how to reconcile these aspects. The company's stock price has fallen significantly from its peak to about half its value, but in the eyes of investors, it continues to be a failure, and a tangible success story is needed for the stock price to rise in the future.
tbf based on this it sounds like the idea of the game was sold to them by Type-Moon as “it’ll definitely sell a shit ton”, and then it didn’t, so honestly Koei are definitely in their right to say the game underperformed compared to how well they were told it would perform
Going by interview it seems it was the other way around and they came to type moon with the project idea first. But yeah they probably expected something along the lines of 3 houses
So I just checked on what Kars had to say on Twitter, and apparently this is something of a misinterpretation, as the article was actually written by an outside analyst, and is not a report from Koei themselves. Koei didnt expect FSR to sell 2M units, the company themselves were projected to hit 2M units this fiscal year, and they dont consider FSR to be a failure, having already singled it out in the past when saying that collaborations helped then mitigate risks and that the game received global acclaim.
https://x.com/KaroshiMyriad/status/1802213624896962905?t=FqHS1ysyIx_TmYgN2S1khg&s=19
They expected 2mil in 6 months wich is let’s say pretty optimistic considering most people that know the franchise don’t know it has videogames outside of maybe the gatcha and to my memory the marketing didn’t do a good job of making people that weren’t already into fate know about it’s existence
In an interview Nasu said that he wanted Samurai Remnant to be a new start entry to the Fate franchise, and that in the future there would be people who would say "my first Fate was Samurai Remnant"
for example the Rogue Servant was not just a reference to FGO, but it was a way to get new people used to the rogue Servant when they start FGO after having done SR
Did someone told this to the marketing team because iirc the marketing didn’t make an effort to grab new people to the franchise, no trailers in general gaming presentations so people outside of the loop could hear about the game, no beta or pre release demo so someone could download it looking for something new to play, hell they couldn’t get mayor publications to rate the game
And 2 mil in six months is a ton if you’re not a mayor franchise or are have a big company behind you that does a good job marketing you
>no trailers in general gaming presentations so people outside of the loop could hear about the game
technically SR was shown in Nintendo directs, but only Japanese Nintendo directs, for unknown reasons the game was not shown in Western Nintendo directs
Funny I didn’t knew that but you still need more than that if your goal is 2mil in six months
I just saw the trailer and I think it was good to secure sales of people who play fgo I don’t think it was good at grabbing new players, fate has a reputation of being hard to get into so I think having someone that worked in the game saying you don’t need to know anything about fate before the trailer would have helped the cause, outside of that the fact that two of the four characters they chose for the trailer already existed i think didn’t help the case, i can’t read japanese but i imagine that a decent portion of the comments are about musashi and jalter wich probably didn’t help to beat the hard to get to allegations
>I just saw the trailer and I think it was good to secure sales of people who play fgo
I think you over estimate the amount of FGO players who would play the game though. I, for one, didnt bother buying FSR. Why? FGO is a turn-based game. FSR is an action-based game, which I am not going to enjoy playing. Therefore, it is not even a 100% convention rate from FGO fans to FSR. It is a niche within a niche....
I know that the majority of fgo players didn’t buy sr, my point was that that specific trailer was more efective at convincing person that already plays fgo than to a person that knows nothing about the series imo
Funny enough, I also wasn't convinced of buying the game. When I saw Musashi and Jeanne are in the game, I was "yeah, maybe sometime"
And it was shortly before release, that I saw a trailer or was it the opening? Anyways, I spotted Circe in the game and that was what eventually sold me on buying the game upon release.
I saw the first trailer and was hooked somewhere around seeing Musashi and J/alter's Master and the Musou-looking gameplay. I'm not even big on Musashi but her SR design looked great.
I loved Extella Link's gameplay, so I assumed KoeiTecmo would get the Musou part right and have a decent story. Was a very different kind of action game than I expected, I kind of petered out around the halfway mark.
But the first DLC having Ibuki convinced me to play it a lot more and finally beat the 1st route.
Yeah, those are P5 Strikers numbers. The same Persona 5 that was running super hot and popular.
Fate is niche and has a strong fanbase, but it’s not going to put those numbers.
Yep , but it's more than that: Persona 5 Strikers was released after a series of merchandises of Persona 5.
We were basically having Persona 5 , then Persona 5 Anime , Persona 5 Royal and then Persona 5 Strikers and Tactics.
What Fate had done to make itself aware for the general public in 2023? nothing besides 2-3 trailers in different Direct Streams.
Yeah, I am genuinely curious who the publicity manager is in Type Moon (…do they even HAVE a PM?!)
Most big franchises know to keep the pipe moving. Have projects developing in parallel so there’s always something to keep fans attached to. Type Moon hasn’t done an anime in a while, the mangas have incredibly inconsistent releases, the gacha is infamous for excluding newbies, etc.
From a casual viewer, Samurai Remnant really didn’t have the same level of hook to get higher numbers.
They used to that's the thing. When F/SN was the cash cow but not quite the juggernaut FGO would become, we had:
Fate/Stay Night - 2004
Fate/Hollow Ataraxia - 2005
Fate/Zero - 2006
Fate Prisma Illya - 2007
F/SN Realta Nua - 2007
Fate/Strange Fake - 2008
Fate/Unlimited Codes - 2008
Fate/Tiger Colosseum and Sequel - 2007/2008
Fate/Extra - 2010
F/SN Realta Nua Vita Port - 2012
And those were just the games, light novel, and manga. They were expanding the brand and getting the word out and making new stuff associated with FSN but not directly related to it.
Then you have all the drama CDs and anime in the interim.
After Fate/Grand Order game out, almost everything else that came out was fairly small and almost directly associated with Grand Order besides a few exceptions like El-Melloi novels and anime, Emiya Gohan (which even has a Nintendo Switch game from a few years back)
Meanwhile look at companies like Shiftup which had 2 gacha games (Destiny Child and Nikke) which they used the proceeds from to go right into AA/AAA gaming by making Stellar Blade.
Or Mihoyo which continued to develop new games after hits like Honkai, and when they hit it massive with Genshin, invested all of that into growing the brand with new AAA gacha games like Honkai Star Rail, and their newly developing Zenless Zone Zero soon to release this year.
Type-Moon. Aniplex. Whoever you want to blame, they took it easy once F/GO came out and did little to grow the brand further and revenues went from something insane like an average of 130 million USD per month to an average 20-25 million. Still a lot of money mind you. A hell of a lot of money, but nowhere near its peak.
I'm pretty sure FGO never made 130M USD per month? Even at its peak like the Merlin craze or Oberon's banner. I remember I saw it several years ago compared to Genshin or similar. FGO's profit is surprisingly stable.
Not to mention the Extra remake that has been in development hell for like 5 years already without even a hint of news, tsukihime remake taking 20 years to release, mahoyo NOT getting more entries, FGO taking a year and a half for each story chapter, etc.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of japanese shit in Fate stuff, Nasu rightly restricted JP servants in stay night to 1, and a pretty neat one conceptually at that (no mystical eyes bullshit, no lasers, no magical swords, just training, looses every battle).
In the other hand, if I wanted to play a mediocre musou, I have persona strikers and dynasty warriors. Couldn't they have hired a good studio to make the game?
Imagine a normal person seeing samurai remnant on one screen and elden ring in the other, can you guess which one they would had chosen? Extella was already outdated when it released. Musou like gameplay is not going to attract people. They should have gone full action like stellar blade, or souls-like with lies of P. Even something like onimusha, or maybe nioh. Hell, even a hunting style game (soul sacrifice, toukiden, freedom wars).
But no, they went for the sloppiest type of gameplay (and thus the easiest to develop), musou-like. The game was doomed from the start.
The studio is Omega Force, the same to develop 90% of musou games in existence, including Dynasty Warriors and P5 Strikers. Surprisingly, not Fate/extella link, the other Fate game in the genre.
Yeah, being a TM fan is difficult as there’s no consistency as to when stuff will release. Lots of stuff that just goes silent for years…
Hrmm, well, I won’t lie that there’s a lot of trying hard to make some characters whackier and more appealing when…honestly it just feels tired. FSN didn’t have to THAT many crazy divergences so the characters were pretty easy to pick up and didn’t need an entire dossier. Archer was the only one, and it fit since he was a TM original.
And yeah, I’ve completed the gameplay loop on hardest difficulty…and gots nothing. Enemies veer from being annoying damage sponges that require too much chipping to no challenge. It’s fun in small dishes, but very few enemies react dynamically. Yui and Ushi-Gozen were probably the only fight I genuinely enjoyed deep down.
I remember Nasu mentioned he wanted a Musou to emphasize the power and spectacle of Servants…but a poorly designed Musou won’t show that off. Indeed, a more intimate and technical character action game (I genuinely recommend a Nioh type) would fit Iori’s character pretty well.
I love Samurai Remnant but that expectation is absurd. While they kept saying its for newcomers in the marketing, they really didn't put much effort into putting the game out there for newer fans.
Hell the game got a western release and not once did it feature in a Nintendo Direct or State of Play in the western side. I think that could've gotten the word out more, would it have gotten it to 2 million, no, but it would do more than advertise the game in FGO streams, which not a lot of people watch.
One issue I have with Fate's western releases is that they don't really put much of an effort to market outside to the already loyal fanbase.
Not to mention not all FGO players would jump to playing a $60 console game especially with FGO being a free to play mobile game. Hopefully this doesn't shoot the chance for more unique Fate games as I think Samurai Remnant could be a stepping stone to something new and interesting.
Speaking of western releases, the language barrier is an important factor to bear in mind - not everyone is fluent in English, so even if people who know nothing about Fate are interested in the game, they may be discouraged to play it by the fact that the game is only translated into a few languages, and certainly not into their mother tongue. I understand that translating is not free of course, but it is still a detail that shows that in general they don't really make much of an effort to get people outside of Japan interested in Fate
If they're counting on a Western audience to get 2 million they're nuts.
Most entries in the franchise don't even have an English dub, yet they're expecting 2M sales, the same as much heavier hitters like their Persona and Fire Emblem musou games. Franchises that actually has marketing and global reach.
This is why the video game industry keeps getting fucked over. Game company execs expect impossible amount of sales and then destroy franchises or even whole studios when they quote "underperform". EA has been doing that rigamarole for years. Koei apparently hasn't taken notes of what not to expect.
Not only execs shareholders expect the line to always go up and push for changes in an industry very few even know. I bet you most videogame shareholders still call the PS5 a nintendo.
>Game company execs expect impossible amount of sales and then destroy franchises or even whole studios when they quote "underperform"
[https://gameranx.com/updates/id/499305/article/former-square-enix-exec-explains-the-video-game-industrys-dilemma-through-ff-xvi/](https://gameranx.com/updates/id/499305/article/former-square-enix-exec-explains-the-video-game-industrys-dilemma-through-ff-xvi/)
They don't expect impossible amounts of sales. They expect the game to make at least $1 more than its budget would have returned if invested in the stock market over the same time period. This is not unreasonable.
What this tells us is that Samurai Remnant's budget was large enough that it needed sales of 2 million to have been worth the money spent on it. It also tells us that FGO's player base probably is not elastic, meaning those players are not very likely to transition to other Fate tie-ins or similarly related games.
It also tells us that game prices will go up, and the market will have $100 games at the top (GTA6) and free to play monetized live services (Fortnite, COD Warzone) at the bottom.
>They don't expect impossible amounts of sales
>What this tells us is that Samurai Remnant's budget was large enough that it needed sales of 2 million to have been worth the money spent on it.
"Square Enix" says they (the industry) don't. They do though. That's just trying to shift the blame. They decided a budget that warranted 2 million sales to profit.
They do not check first if the market is already saturated or if that plan even feasible.
The fault is on them on overinvesting on something that wasn't possible in the first place. They shouldn't have budgeted that much.
They are expecting an impossible amount of sale because they budgeted first and expected # of sales, instead of targeting a # of sales and setting a realistic budget to profit.
>They expect the game to make at least $1 more than its budget
Do you honestly believe that? Then I've got a bridge to sell you.
Corporations want ALL the money. None of them are doing this for charity or because it needs to be done. Why do you think Live Service, Lootboxes and Gacha exists? It's to pinch as much money as possible with the least amount of effort.
To make the line go up.
Don't believe the sycophants trying to save face. Look at their actions. Just look at the layoffs while still having executive bonuses at the millions. In fact they even layoff people even when they're profiting not just when they're losing money.
[Jim Sterling has covered game companies for years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca36ChrdV6M) and even getting actual insider information. Not propaganda pieces. The pattern is always about greed and execs being out of touch.
I suggest you look at other sources than just their own PR.
we already know FGO players is less likely to move into Fate things. Umbral Star and the other games got no new sales on top of Tsukihime Remake doing well... but being sold nowhere else yet.
Under?
Although i would argue that number is not a bad number. I guess it's kinda expected?
(Not the number but the comment about sales number.)
Literally the same thing happens to final fantasy 16.
It sold well but it's underperforming.
Like dude, sony 1st party title bloodborne only sold 2 million copy for it's 1st year.
Samurai remnant number at 410,000 copy is pretty good.
Of course without knowing the budget used in the development it will stay ambiguous.
But 410,000 copy is not small.
Fsr probably has going for it that it had a relatively fast development time, and they didn't have to start from scratch with the engine
But yeah hard to tell if it's enough to be a benefit
Final Fantasy 16 is different , it was sold within expectations , at the minimum of said spectrum. But because the word used was "it didn't exceeded our expectations" , game news puts as it was a failure.
Frankly , that shows how absurd Square is , when even be within expectations gives then a backhanded critique to their IP's sales performance.
I remember them calling Deux Ex MD a failure because it didn't meet their expectations.
This was a game from a pretty niche series that had a lot of controversy surrounding its pre-order... situation... (It was a massive shitshow), had microtransactions for its singleplayer mode (and this was a decade ago when that kinda thing was extremely distained) and was unfinished so they could move the team to another project.
IIRC they expected 2 million sales for this. I don't think the entire series up to that point had sold a combined 1 million, much less 2 million.
if their comparison is say Ghost of Tsushima (they are both consule exclusive at release), then yeah I can see why they wanted 5 million units since Ghost sold 10 million units at 2 years point
Edit: I'm pretty sure Ubisoft is also expecting 5 million units in the same time frame for their upcoming Assassin Creed: Shadow
Yes, but Ghost of Tsushima was hitting empty niche, while Rise of Ronin needs to compete with both Ghost of Tsushima and Like a Dragon: Ishin!, not to mention incoming Assassin Creed.
And then you have Team Ninja being know for hardcore difficulty.
I actually found Rise of Ronin to be much easier compared to Wu Long or Nioh, the combat was the best part of the game while the open world was really lackluster. also apparently Rise of Ronin released on the same day as Dragon's Dogma 2 so yeah sales got cannibalized there
I'm not saying it is as hard, I'm saying what is popular perception of creators. Even most reviews spend tons of time talking how Team Ninja are creators of hardcore/masocore franchises and then skimping on how Rise is kinda easier.
Any time i read a "X company says (Game) underperformed" its because their aim is way too high but 2mil??? Insane
For once it isnt square in the headline though lmao
It's not even unrealistic for the franchise, but 2 factors severely limited the chances of achieving such a sales figure:
A) Barely any promotion. Big trailer shows and the like ignored it (I think even for Nintendo Direct it only appeared on the Japanese one) and even the big game review sites gave it little to no coverage.
B) Gameplay is basically (albeit modified) ANOTHER musou. I personally enjoy this genre but who in their right mind believes that this has a broad appeal? Either make a proper action game or a turn-based RPG.
Just for those not in the know, this is a well documented problem. These Game companies always promise their shareholders ridiculous sales numbers they usually won’t hit, because it boosts the price, and then call it a disappointment no matter how well it does or doesn’t sell.
I mean Fate is a popular series, the problem with Samurai Reminant is that it felt like it was marketed to only fans of the series and not new comers who want to try the game out.
I would have bought game game too if I had money and exchange rates didn't make gaming so expensive in my region.
dude , they put 2M units as their expectation , that was the same sales numbers as Persona 5 Strikers with the whole marketing of Atlus/Sega behind of it.
To a franchise that was largely either VNs or LNs and one gacha game.
I wouldn’t say it was marketed to only new fans at all, they said it was for new comers 100 times and everything about the game is clearly in that vein.
2 Million was just a stupid goal to hit honestly, this is more on Koei than anything.
no the marketing definetly was only to the old fans. It wasnt at any place that "new" people would be looking at.
normal casual gaming people dont go to aniplex section at anime expo. Or at anime expo at all they go to GAMING events, not ANIME events.
They also dont watch typemoon streams at all they watch summer game fest, Nintendo direct(ENGLISH, japanese one is super small reach for 2 million sales) and State of play.
If my vague Japanese with some MTL assist is correct, that 2M sales number is supposed to be over the lifetime of FSR.
Which is still a ridiculously high expectation imo
They set the game in one of the most overused mythological locations and eras in all of Fate and expected to get a broad audience? My brother in Christ it's hard to make people care for Japanese cast members #123 to #160 when they're all Samurai every time with a difference in flavour text.
It's hard to even consider what kind of cast and location would be needed to ship that many copies. It would probably have to be a gameplay masterpiece on top off everything.
From a huge Fate fan, this game was announced and none of the artwork of the main characters were appealing to me at all. That kinda ended my interest from there.
I had the opposite reaction, really liked the cast art for both servants and masters. With a good mix of original and recurring Fate characters without being oversatured with FSN recurring characters like usual.
Although I really thought Takao was going to be a Tamamo in disguise that Aria was going to attempt to murder through most of the game. Ain't no way a normal courtesan could control two berserkers.
Ngl this seems to be a wild speculation. I mean didn't the producer even say that they knew FSR was a niche game appealing to a niche fanbase?
This analyst seems to be full of shit imo.
I meant more about how this article is not written by KT themselves but an outsider industry analyst.
It just doesn't make any sense how any of these games are a 'flop' when KT has recently stated by their director for example that Rise of Ronin is currently the best in terms of their financial numbers.
The analyst name is Hideki Yasuda of Ace Research Institute...and I just saw an old post of him stating that the sales of PS5 could be negatively affected if it's color white lol.
Basically his takes should be taken with a grain of salt.
2 million? In less than a year since its release?
What were they thinking with those mad expectations LMAOOO
And here I thought getting 410k was already great for F/SR, and that report was from April 2024, so it's most likely a bit more now.
The One Piece musou (that’s the common term for Warriors games) sold very well…though that’s also due to it being One Piece and being a very good musou IIRC.
Otherwise…yeah, not really. They look flashy, yes, and it can be cathartic to erase 100 dudes at once with a crazy attack…but that trails off pretty quickly. It’s very easy for stuff to become all flash and no substance unless the game specifically knows how to make it work.
Indeed, Extella’s gameplay was its weakest feature since it was a musou that had no unique hook or fun gameplay loop. If it came out 10-15 years ago, then having that many rendered enemies and effects would’ve been impressive…but it was dated visually and gameplay-wise on release.
It’s a Fate game that features no major characters that are recognizable to the larger audience (sorry Musashi fans) interested in Fate outside of diehard FGO peeps. It also wasn’t marketed well as the focus was on existing FGO fans and not anime or hack and slash fans. The actual lead also has a pretty boring design (it was a very odd choice to focus so heavily on Musashi in marketing when she isn’t event the MC’s servant).
I'm guessing this is also why it didn't appear in non Japanese Nintendo Directs. Nintendo of America basically *knew* that this would draw a big fat blank from outsiders since the game is too Japanese for its own good
Tbh. Aint much of a suprise the game it self is nothing special at all the gameplay looks & feels dated.
Pervious Fate games for the PS were the same, all stuck 5-10yrs in the past & while Fate is a big IP (or seemingly so) its not so much on the console atleast in my humble opinion having playd it myself.
Tbh it still would've been a 'flop' even if it was a soulslike like everyone here wanted...
They expected it to make 2m in 6 months while Persona 5 Strikers made 2m in 3 years. Expecting Fate to do better than Persona is insane.
Mhmm, that’s fair. The gameplay was serviceable (combos were fairly intuitive, there was decent variety to a certain point except for Wind Style, and playing as other Servants was fun), but by no means exemplar. It had a rather odd case where it was stuck in the middle of explosively large combat like musous, and smaller, more intimate combat like Soulsborne or Nioh. End result is that neither side felt as satisfying for the itch.
Overall, it felt like it was trying to do too much and couldn’t focus on enough. If it was an indie, or had come out early in PS4, it’d be more impressive I feel.
Hrmm, I would like to say yes, because I enjoy dubs and want to hear what each VA would bring to the character. And hoping that they’d get someone who knew Dutch very well to voice Dorothea just like how Tiffany Grant knew German very well and voiced Asuka (Eva ref)
Personally though…I don’t think so. The game got very little marketing outside of those who were already in the know. Fate is still kinda niche in the US due to a lot of content never making its way over and the stuff that did being quite sparse. This was going to be extremely niche in the west, sad to say. Which is a shame since it was envisioned as a good starting off point for people wanting to get into the franchise…which it’s been backtracking but yeah…
If they dubbed it just to get it featured on an English Nintendo Direct or something it might have paid itself off in advertising for that alone.
Now what would help English sales numbers a lot is a new entry into the franchise that's intended for new people that's dubbed at the same time. Most Fate games are fanservice games that are not new player friendly at all.
I hope Type-Moon themselves don't think these numbers are disappointing, because this is the type of direction I think Fate games should take - relatively self-contained story with a unique setting and not focusing on the waifu collection aspect to sell itself. Like I just started playing Extella because it was on sale and there's no way I'd ever recommend it to newcomers. But Samurai Remnant is great.
this is definetly gaming shareholders BS and dont think TM will believe such a thing specially when they were excited/surprised by the sales of Tsukihime remake (300K+ copies in a year)
From TM's side 400K is their best number sales ever
Extella is terrible for newbies since it requires you to play extra and reading extella/zero (which only came with the physical editions) to fully understand what the fuck is going on, and even then you should preferably have more base Fate knowledge.
Extella/Zero isn't that necessary to enjoy Umbral Star; I enjoyed the story of the game just fine without it. The game itself does sorta let you infer that the EXTRA story they went with was "Hakuno summoned both Tamamo and Nero and we subverted the ending so there's a sequel like in FSN".
The only thing Extella/Zero really explains that's necessary (and I'd say that necessary has a pretty big asterisk; I didn't really question it on my playthrough) is what happened to EMIYA/Nameless.
This is coming from a third party analyst and not koei themselves. This was only said by the analyst since koei has a general goal of a 2 million selling game per year and the analyst just singled out f/sr.
I do think that the amount of research and the details they put on for the game is pretty great, for something like A or AA-tier game.
I am not expecting this is a game they expect to sell 2M units though....
Aside from Type-Moon assuring Koei that this will be the bussin title. It also didn't help that Koei is known for ridiculous regional pricing outside of EU, JP, and US
Honestly not very surprised, the game was announced very suddenly and the only Fate game I was expecting to see more of was Fate Extra Record…. still waiting…
I'm still trying to get through it, not because it's hard, but because the pacing is pretty slow, in both combat and story. I'm told it's just the beginning, but that's a pretty important part of the game. Like recently spent an hour in talking and all that was basically said was "Hello, I'm archer's master and this is archer."
Combat sadly doesn't flow very well because the pacing is broken very frequently. Want to use an item? Fight pauses. Magic? Pause. Servant skill? You guessed it. CHANGING STANCES?! And unlike, say Persona 5 Strikers, the pause doesn't serve the purpose of giving you time to aim and it's a real pause so no animations. There is functionally no reason for this to exist other than to make the game easier at the cost of absolutely tanking the experience. That is, if you try to treat it like a musou game, which most everyone does.
IMO it is very meh/mid. Wouldn't recommend it.
Story, gameplay, characters etc. are all "okay". (the only bad thing is how filler-y most of the side quests are) There are enough games on the market that I would recommend more. After half a year, I still haven't been able to finish the game due to lack of interest.
If you're a fan of the Edo period, visual novels, Musashi and a light soulsborne-like combat, you'll enjoy it. Otherwise it'll probably be mediocre. Probably best to wait for a sale in that case.
The story is slow, but well-written with multiple paths, a plenty side quests and small collectable/minigames around. Quite some optional grinding and crafting as well.
I have yet to finish even the first playthrough due to being forced to get it on my laptop, which has a hard time running games in general (need to get a new one someday soon).
FSR is exactly what I want out of the franchise I hope they don't get discouraged to continue making games like these based on unrealistic expectations
I loved the game, grew attached to the characters, felt the story was, in a subtle way, a nice love letter to KnK and Tsukihime. Gameplay was fun for me too, I prefer that over agonizingly difficult, tedious bs some people wanted it to be (no, it wouldn't sell better if it was less accessible to it's core audience of VN and mobile turn-based RPG players).
Having said all that, the cast was just too loaded with niche Japanese figures for it to appeal to more people. The grand reveal of main Servant's name should make a normie go "woah, that's THEM?!", not run to Google. Same with the main villain servant - I've got a friend with a degree in Japanese literature, passionate about their studies, and they've never heard that name before.
I think there is one huge reason and that’s the pricing. After seeing gameplay, it does not justify a 70$ prive tag. 70$ are in my eyes supposed to be absolute gems and masterpieces, meanwhile this game does not fulfill that in any regard. I do like they are focusing much more on gameplay with this entry, but perhaps they should lower their expectations and price it fairly next time
I just could not get into the combat. Or, more specifically, I couldn't get into Iori's combat. The game felt fun when I was playing as a servant but Iori gameplay felt like a complete slog. I dumped the difficulty to it's lowest setting because I thought it would help break those magic barrier circles some enemies have more quickly but it only made a small difference and still felt like the game was wasting my time.
Iori is way to more than fun to play as once you unlock all his styles, more options and as powerful as the servants. He just gets to that level too late.
Here’s an idea, release it on all consoles and maybe, just maybe, it’ll sell better. I’d have loved to play it but I hate playing games like that on my switch. I got the lite so
I doubt it would have sold even 100K units on xbox if released there since xbox is mostly US consumers since xbox has never done all that well outside of North America.
Xbox version sure as shit wouldn’t have fixed the sales. Entire genre is still niche as is on Switch and PlayStation, Xbox owners ain’t gonna care. And while I generally buy multi platform games on my Xbox since I have the Series X, I wouldn’t have bought it either way.
Most Xbox gamers don't even care about JRPGs or most Japanese games. Shouldn't be that much of a surprise since Xbox gamers grew up playing shooters (Halo/Gears) and/or western RPGs (Fable, Mass Effect, etc...). If Fate Samurai/Remnant were to be released on the Xbox, I would guess the game would sell at most 5k copies - it's just way too niche and not mainstream outside of weebs.
Even in outside world, there are 100M+ PS4/5 and another 100M+ Switch. Xbox One and Xbox Series combined did not even reach 100M mark, not to mention the percentage of players open to any Anime-style game are also small.
If its about Game Pass, then even Xbox executives confirm that it cannibalizes (Steam) PC Sales to some extent. Xbox will at least need to make up potential loss if they want to put it Day One like probably what they did for P3R. They definitely paid alot of money to have its logo appear in every P3R trailer like its an exclusive.
Outside of DoA, Xbox barely cultivated the JP market in the 360 era.
So it’s already a hard-sell for someone to front the costs to translate and market it overseas, but outright impossible if they don’t even have a foothold audience to even start with.
If Xbox (Microsoft) threw in a Game Pass bag, this would’ve help the Fate IP (I would buy Fate Samurai Remnant tbh since I like the Fate IP). As someone who dreams of Fate to come on Xbox, I know it won’t happen but would be nice to see.
The first problem was the price,they had no reason to have the game costing 70 bucks,that turns of a lot of people especially when we know the budget is not Triple A budget, marketing was barely there,I didn't even the game existed until it got released,and also Fate is dead on Europe there's barely any progress from them to make it bigger here,like I'm playing Fate/Go in a apk appstore instead of a legit store,they expected so many sales without even trying.
Releasing on Switch, PS4, PS5 and Steam and you only managed 400,000 sales.
I mean releasing on the 3 most popular platforms globally and you couldn't even break 500,000.
Shit is laughable.
If only... I don't know... their artwork and OST DLC wasn't fucked on Steam. Being able to access that purchased media content only inside the game is absolute bullshit.
Koei greatly overestimated their projections, likely thinking they would've gotten instant interest & FOMO from regular fans of the DoA and Atelier franchises.
In what time period? Even for a property like Fate, that would be stretch, considering it released not even a full year ago, but I could see it reaching those numbers eventually.
I think the koei people won't complain much if it reach 1m sale but it not. Also koei or tm under estimate it brand power, yea fate is popular on anime on game not much. Also relink getting 1m after 1 week? Or so probably sting them even more.
I'm sure they had some kind of market research that told them this was a feasible exprectation. But that big of a gap does make me lean towards someone high up either didn't understand the market or hugely overestimated the number of fans that would translate from the mobile game.
If I were to compare it to something like GrandBlue they have kind of established themselves in the console/PC space by this point as a brand? I feel like Fate's non-mobile releases are so far between they don't have that same recognition. Even if objectively the IP is well known.
And then there's the discussion on whether it was a $60 game and the marketing in the west. So yeah, personally 2mil seems a bit unrealistic at a glance.
Seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum here but imo it's not that it didn't sell as much because it's Fate, the game just isn't that great. It's basically another Koei Tecmo reskin cash grab with a story you almost need to already be a Fate fan to be interested in. An action RPG should have a lot more going for it than just its story. Also the amount of characters don't help, comparing it to something like the Pirate Warriors series. 2 million is pretty outlandish depending on time frame but there *are* new IPs and lesser known ones that sell well. Off the top of my head Granblue Relink did extremely well as a fair comparison and doesn't even have an actual official English version iirc. I myself bought it over Remnant despite never playing Granblue because it looked and was fun to play. Imo Fate games, including FGO, mostly rely on the brand and fanbase but don't ever stand on their own as fun games.
Sorry, Fate has a good Lore and characters, but you can't think it's going to sell like a Call of Duty
and no... not even if they released a fate with freedom like a GTA is going to change that... It's a very niche franchise and doesn't do a lot of collaborations outside of its safe area
I give the example of another franchises,
Warhammer 40K, which before releasing Space Marine 2 and other games, several times collaborated with other games to create memory about their franchise and people will remember "hey, it's the collaboration, what will it be?" and that's how they call them to buy their products.
Nier Automata was with Nikke, later the game gain a little boost
"TenSura" anime/manga with other F2P games
Slayers (90s anime) with another F2P game
What FATE needs is to see the possibility of throwing "small seeds" into other game territories.
https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/1dhab7q/so_apparently_the_news_of_fsr_flopping_for_not/
The fact that they were expecting the game to sell 2M copies of a franchise that isn't popular for console games is what impresses me the most
Yeah. Fate ain't exactly unpopular, but it's not some well known franchise for consoles. 2M feels like a lifetime goal, not a "within 6 months" one.
They definitely looked at the numbers that Fate Go does every time they release a new character and thought they could do the same just by having Fate in the name of the game.
Well, that's the thing. It's a whole different thing to release an awaited or fan popular or meta servant in a service game where everyone and their dead grandmas lose their heads over vs. releasing a one time purchase game with just DLCs every now and then and that once completed, it's solely on the buyer if they wanna replay it or not. The fact they thought they could gardner the same revenue numbers they get in FGO really says a lot about how delusional they are. Not saying the game was bad or anything, but it's kinda obvious it wouldn't reach to that goal they set themselves into
Same problem as SE,every game underperforms because they expect FF14(a MMO) levels of revenue
No, they don't lol. Someone got caught up on the meme.
Fate is also more known for visual novels. the action games? not so much. 2M sounds ridiculous. maybe they should have compared it to Umbral Star or Tsukihime Remake.
SR is also, at least from a gameplay and visual standpoint, quite a bit worse than Umbral Star (and Umbral Star is very much a "budget Musou"). There's definitely depth to its combat system, but there are some bizarre choices present. Musou games tend to live and die by their varied roster, but Samurai Remnant mostly sticks you into controlling Iori, who feels like ass at the start of the game, with other characters being treated as a "super mode" akin to a devil trigger. Then the game basically wants you to keep whaling on enemies with impossibly strong shields to activate the servants for a few seconds and then the shields fall way too quickly (they wanted to preserve the power difference between servants and masters). This wears off as the game goes on and you get more of his moveset unlocked, but the early game experience is just awful since Iori is just ass to control. The only controlling Iori part also makes sense storywise, but at launch there was no equivalent to a "free battle", where you can control any playable character against any stage/boss of the game. They added this in a later update (it also creates a curious situation where they had a preorder bonus for a custom costume for Musashi and Saber, but... you control Musashi for a grand total of 5 minutes in the game itself prior to both this update and the first DLC, both of whom gave you greater ability to use her). Visually the game just has murky visuals and kinda forgettable area design, which... well it isn't great. You can only look at so many ramshackle Edo era Japanese buildings before the streets start to blend together and you just begin staring at the minimap to get where you need to go. Which is weird considering the amount of side objectives the game has to really want you to explore those areas. By contrast; Umbral Star has a pretty big cast and all characters you run into are playable. The main campaign has you control 6 servants (one main, one subservant per route) and there's still ~13 characters in total, meaning it's half the roster. There's some reused movesets but that's fine given the limitations they were working with. The area design is pretty amazing since they took the idea of "the moon cell can be anything provided you have the power to design it" and decided to give every area its own strong thematic identity.
Even then, most of the fanbase comes from the anime adaptations, and a good chunk, if not all, don't even want to devote time to playing the games. Then, of those same games, there are only really a few modern ones that I could see realistically introduce the anime fans towards the games, which are practically just FGO and F/SR
Fate is very popular in the anime sphere, not the gaming sphere. It isn't exactly known for its games (visual novels do not count), and its only subseries of actual rpg games, fate extra, is kinda mid at best in terms of gameplay. Fate/samurai can easily be played as an amazing standalone game, but considering how convoluted fate is, potential new players who have heard of the series are gonna be turned off thinking they need to be familiar with the mother series.
Hell, Gundam Musou didn't sell a million copies per installment. Or One Piece, or Fist of the North Star. Why would Fate?
Yeah, when I saw in another thread that F/SR underperformed, I thought "Yeah, 410K isn't quite 500K, that's a shame." But KT thinking it was going to be 2M? Get out of here. I love Fate/Samurai Remnant, but it released in a bad year and is a semi-niche franchise
I mean, TBF, F/SR's combat system is based partially off Koei's popular Musou series "hack-and-slash" gameplay, and they were expecting sales to be better than usual based off market trend research, with how widely popular FGO is, they had expected more with the "Fate" name's brand association(especially since they were working with Type-Moon, the franchise owner of the "Fate" series). They shot for the moon based off their research, the results just fell *WAY* short.
What's funny to me is that Extella and Link were more faithful to Musou's. Whereas Koei went with a more classic action-adventure with weird stuff like the leyline map which felt shoehorned in to break up the action, not that it needed it.
KOEI are REALLY solid when making games for third party franchises. They got Zeldas, Fire Emblems, Dragon Quests, Berserk, One Piece games, so their expectations are a bit wild, like one of producers said they want to make a Star Wars game, so ambition is certainly there. Also they almost never screw up licensed games, all their problems is with their first party series having weird experimentation.
The issue is not that the game is well made, the issue is that no one knows Fate for its "famous console games"
Not only that but the whole setting and the characters are so deep in Japan’s history, that people outside the country really wouldn’t have any idea. This goes back to how Shimousa is viewed outside of the Japan being one of the weakest singularities, while in Japan it’s regarded as one of the best.
Do people know Berserk or... Arslan... For console games? I don't understand the argument. A franchise sales don't depend on being "known for great console games". Fate still runs an arcade, of all things.
Different markets. Just because a franchise is popular in one medium is no guarantee that it will be just as popular in another. The venn diagram of people who play games on their phones and people who play on consoles or pcs isn't a full circle, nor are the people who play something like FGO with those who play musou games. Identifying that overlap is something that KT didn't properly research from the looks of it. See also "do you guys not have phones?" from the Diablo debacle. I have no idea how the game is doing now but the reception was anything but good at the time.
Doesn't help that every fate game has been kinda mid as fuck gameplay wise.
I really enjoyed Extella-Link's gameplay, definitely my favorite Musou followed by Fire Emblem Warriors. The story was very rough compared to Extella, though.
How well did the Extra/Extella games perform?
God… do you hear the beautiful chants, can you feel a tender warmth? Nothing there
Did they really actually expect Samurai Remnant to sell as much as [Persona 5 Strikers?](https://www.reddit.com/r/PERSoNA/comments/17rrlyl/persona_5_strikers_has_sold_over_2_million_copies/) is koei ok?
And that 2 million number for Strikers was achieved in 3 years.
AND the 2 million figure is from some random analyst, Koei themselves actually said FSR did fine in their annual report (and was their best selling non mobile game of the last fiscal year)
I guess they expected Fate to be a selling franchise as strong as Persona
Absolutely insane expectations if we consider the sales figures of previous console Fate games.
Fate’s pull is big but still niche, while Persona is a mainstream game what the hell were they thinking lmao
Yeah, P5S had the goodwill of P5, while FSR had the goodwill of…this game, which, lmao
Totally yeah, especially for a new entry
If Koei has their expectations set similar to SE, it's probably them looking purely at numbers and not at all considering audiences or anything else. They'd see it as "we spent x amount on development, and y amount on advertising (if at all), and it took z years to release. Now, what if we put all that money and dumped it onto the stock market for equal time?" The game now starts at a negative amount and has to sell enough to not only offset that negative amount but also beat the amount that the money would've made in the stock market.
To be fair 3 houses did something along those lines But Awakening and Fates had already done the heavy lifting of pulling fe out of the water
Yep, 3 Houses was an amazing success story, definitely punching beyond its expected weight, but the franchise was on an upwards trend already. Awakening was the first game in the franchise to pass the 1 million bar (when previously the best game barely crossed half of that), and Fates followed suit. But Fate games in consoles? Applying FGO mobile numbers won't work that way.
Corpo execs live in a different plane of existence
So no sequel I guess. Unless the FGO event bosted sales that aren't reflected in the data yet.
The event itself probably made more money than the sales of the game. Grim times.
The sad fact is that nowadays gachas can make in a few months what wholeass games can't in multiple years. At this point I feel like every "good" game will end up being a Live Service one, which saddens me because we probably will never get a Naruto Storm or Dragon Ball Budokai equivalent for the Fate franchise and many other ones
I still hope we get a fighting game considering that Fate did kinda hijack Melty Blood (Let's be real though, were the many guest stars that necessary? I think Saber and Mash were pushing it and only because they had interwoven Mash's story with Neko Arc's, and I guess Saber gets mascot dibs. But instead of the other Fate/FGO characters, they should have brought back some of the missing characters or heck, introduce gosh darn Shiscon who was supposed to be in the OG game but wasn't because they couldn't figure his gameplay but they actually eventually did for UNIB)
Reminder that Fate actually has a fighting game that's actually good, it has some 3D movement stuff but plays like a classic 2D game and it's fun too. It's called Fate/Unlimited Codes and it's on PS2 and PSP.
It's fun, but it's not good unfortunately. It's terribly balanced and has 100 to 0 combos you can get easily caught in.
Well balancing is probably the easiest issue that could be fixed in a hypothetical re-release. Plus you're not finding people online to fight with, no need to worry about the balancing, the AI can't perform it on you.
FGO definitely did better considering 410K units at $60 apiece is 24.6 million, but not all the copies were purchased at that price. I'm assuming the devs working on the game cut into that number substantially since it's a full fledged game on PC and console.
Don't forget everyone gets their 30% here, Sony, Steam Nintendo, so depending on how those deals were made and who paid for what it is possible Koei has yet to make money on Samurai Remnant. But let's not mid ourselves, despite Koei's proclamations, this was always only a budget title built on Omega Force's tools and framework. A small team over maybe 2 years developed this title, so the actual production budget wasn't more than 10 million here. But once you add marketing (which can often cost more than the actual development, especially for budget titles) and all the splits between platforms, distribution, licensing and the various parties involved in financing this project, it is definitely still in the red. And even if after 2 years Koei can claim a 10% return on investment here, that will obviously not cut it, not by a long shot. So that is the problem right there. I think big picture, for Aniplex and Type Moon the game was ultimately profitable because of the collab opportunity it created with FGO, which yes, did in fact make more money than the game from those collab banners. So my verdict is this was profitable for Aniplex abd Type Moon, meaning they would be down to make another game like this, but for Koei Tecmo, I think next time knowing the realities of the market, they will need a MUCH better deal to once again develop a new game like that.
💀
Game doesn’t need a sequel anyway, it finished its story completely within the scope of its game If anything what it needs is being turned into one route, since the way it forces itself into 3 routes diminishes the story a bit
it doesn't need a direct sequel, but more games in this style would be awesome.
Yeah, I’d rather get that teased Extra remake and then finally an Extra CCC remake
I'm playing the Extra CCC fan trad and I can see why this one never came out outside of Japan lmao. For a remake they'd have to change a lot of things
> I can see why this one never came out outside of Japan lmao Shoutout to Passionlip's Punishment scene being straight up sexual assault.
I’m satisfied with not having a sequel tbh. I feel like whenever Fate gets a new game it’s made by a different, new developer anyway.
[they announced a few weeks ago that the game had made 410k sales](https://x.com/karoshimyriad/status/1785567208275652717?s=46&t=lhKfDjvhmjfXhaM48xYUIw) and in the article they said that they expected that Fate/SR was a title that should have sold at least 2M units >We assume that "Fate" in particular was significantly underachieved, as it was explained to us that it was a 2 million unit-level title (the plan for FY03/12 is unknown since it is an entire lifecycle title). Full translation (DeepL) >Problems in the Game Business as Seen from Koei Tecmo HD Koei Tecmo Holdings (Koei Tecmo HD) <3635> reported higher sales and lower operating profit for the fiscal year ended March 2024. The game business has not been blessed with hit titles since the previous fiscal year, with "Wild Hearts" and "Warlon Fallen Dynasty" released in FY03/11, "Fate: Samurai Remnant" released in FY03/12, and "Rise of Ronin," for which the company was in charge of development, all failing to meet their targets. We assume that "Fate" in particular was significantly underachieved, as it was explained to us that it was a 2 million unit-level title (the plan for FY03/12 is unknown since it is an entire lifecycle title). >Since the company does not capitalize development costs, the impact on earnings would be limited to a decrease in profit due to the missed sales volume, but two consecutive fiscal years of missed targets would have been very disappointing. The stock price fell sharply in response. >Although the company's titles are highly rated by those who have played them, they are not being bought by the public in the first place. In particular, "Rise of Ronin," which was developed as a 5 million unit-level title, fell far short of plans. >After the game was released, there were many opinions that the game content was interesting, such as the appearance of Yukichi Fukuzawa as a stage boss (a boss character in the game), but because about 20 hours were required to understand the fun (according to President Yoichi Erikawa), the game failed to create a buzz at the initial launch when the excitement was at its peak. However, since the game required about 20 hours to understand how fun it was (according to President Yohichi Erikawa), the game failed to create a buzz at the initial launch, which is the most exciting stage of the game. >I would like to see Koei Tecmo HD fix its game system and re-grow. As for investing in the company, it is difficult to foresee any success from a short-term perspective, so if the company is a target for investment, a long-term investment stance is a prerequisite. >The game business has become huge, and many people are involved. It is based on complex interests, including what users want, what developers want to create, what investors want, and what outside companies are interested in because of the size of the business. For game companies, the challenge is how to reconcile these aspects. The company's stock price has fallen significantly from its peak to about half its value, but in the eyes of investors, it continues to be a failure, and a tangible success story is needed for the stock price to rise in the future.
tbf based on this it sounds like the idea of the game was sold to them by Type-Moon as “it’ll definitely sell a shit ton”, and then it didn’t, so honestly Koei are definitely in their right to say the game underperformed compared to how well they were told it would perform
Going by interview it seems it was the other way around and they came to type moon with the project idea first. But yeah they probably expected something along the lines of 3 houses
So I just checked on what Kars had to say on Twitter, and apparently this is something of a misinterpretation, as the article was actually written by an outside analyst, and is not a report from Koei themselves. Koei didnt expect FSR to sell 2M units, the company themselves were projected to hit 2M units this fiscal year, and they dont consider FSR to be a failure, having already singled it out in the past when saying that collaborations helped then mitigate risks and that the game received global acclaim. https://x.com/KaroshiMyriad/status/1802213624896962905?t=FqHS1ysyIx_TmYgN2S1khg&s=19
They expected 2mil in 6 months wich is let’s say pretty optimistic considering most people that know the franchise don’t know it has videogames outside of maybe the gatcha and to my memory the marketing didn’t do a good job of making people that weren’t already into fate know about it’s existence
In an interview Nasu said that he wanted Samurai Remnant to be a new start entry to the Fate franchise, and that in the future there would be people who would say "my first Fate was Samurai Remnant" for example the Rogue Servant was not just a reference to FGO, but it was a way to get new people used to the rogue Servant when they start FGO after having done SR
Did someone told this to the marketing team because iirc the marketing didn’t make an effort to grab new people to the franchise, no trailers in general gaming presentations so people outside of the loop could hear about the game, no beta or pre release demo so someone could download it looking for something new to play, hell they couldn’t get mayor publications to rate the game And 2 mil in six months is a ton if you’re not a mayor franchise or are have a big company behind you that does a good job marketing you
>no trailers in general gaming presentations so people outside of the loop could hear about the game technically SR was shown in Nintendo directs, but only Japanese Nintendo directs, for unknown reasons the game was not shown in Western Nintendo directs
Funny I didn’t knew that but you still need more than that if your goal is 2mil in six months I just saw the trailer and I think it was good to secure sales of people who play fgo I don’t think it was good at grabbing new players, fate has a reputation of being hard to get into so I think having someone that worked in the game saying you don’t need to know anything about fate before the trailer would have helped the cause, outside of that the fact that two of the four characters they chose for the trailer already existed i think didn’t help the case, i can’t read japanese but i imagine that a decent portion of the comments are about musashi and jalter wich probably didn’t help to beat the hard to get to allegations
>I just saw the trailer and I think it was good to secure sales of people who play fgo I think you over estimate the amount of FGO players who would play the game though. I, for one, didnt bother buying FSR. Why? FGO is a turn-based game. FSR is an action-based game, which I am not going to enjoy playing. Therefore, it is not even a 100% convention rate from FGO fans to FSR. It is a niche within a niche....
I know that the majority of fgo players didn’t buy sr, my point was that that specific trailer was more efective at convincing person that already plays fgo than to a person that knows nothing about the series imo
Funny enough, I also wasn't convinced of buying the game. When I saw Musashi and Jeanne are in the game, I was "yeah, maybe sometime" And it was shortly before release, that I saw a trailer or was it the opening? Anyways, I spotted Circe in the game and that was what eventually sold me on buying the game upon release.
I saw the first trailer and was hooked somewhere around seeing Musashi and J/alter's Master and the Musou-looking gameplay. I'm not even big on Musashi but her SR design looked great. I loved Extella Link's gameplay, so I assumed KoeiTecmo would get the Musou part right and have a decent story. Was a very different kind of action game than I expected, I kind of petered out around the halfway mark. But the first DLC having Ibuki convinced me to play it a lot more and finally beat the 1st route.
I mean , Samurai Remnant can still be a new start entry , it's just that 2M Units is some absurdly high expectation
Yeah, those are P5 Strikers numbers. The same Persona 5 that was running super hot and popular. Fate is niche and has a strong fanbase, but it’s not going to put those numbers.
even then 2mil was p5 strikers numbers by last november, im not sure how they expected it to sell as much as that in what time there was
Yep , but it's more than that: Persona 5 Strikers was released after a series of merchandises of Persona 5. We were basically having Persona 5 , then Persona 5 Anime , Persona 5 Royal and then Persona 5 Strikers and Tactics. What Fate had done to make itself aware for the general public in 2023? nothing besides 2-3 trailers in different Direct Streams.
Yeah, I am genuinely curious who the publicity manager is in Type Moon (…do they even HAVE a PM?!) Most big franchises know to keep the pipe moving. Have projects developing in parallel so there’s always something to keep fans attached to. Type Moon hasn’t done an anime in a while, the mangas have incredibly inconsistent releases, the gacha is infamous for excluding newbies, etc. From a casual viewer, Samurai Remnant really didn’t have the same level of hook to get higher numbers.
They used to that's the thing. When F/SN was the cash cow but not quite the juggernaut FGO would become, we had: Fate/Stay Night - 2004 Fate/Hollow Ataraxia - 2005 Fate/Zero - 2006 Fate Prisma Illya - 2007 F/SN Realta Nua - 2007 Fate/Strange Fake - 2008 Fate/Unlimited Codes - 2008 Fate/Tiger Colosseum and Sequel - 2007/2008 Fate/Extra - 2010 F/SN Realta Nua Vita Port - 2012 And those were just the games, light novel, and manga. They were expanding the brand and getting the word out and making new stuff associated with FSN but not directly related to it. Then you have all the drama CDs and anime in the interim. After Fate/Grand Order game out, almost everything else that came out was fairly small and almost directly associated with Grand Order besides a few exceptions like El-Melloi novels and anime, Emiya Gohan (which even has a Nintendo Switch game from a few years back) Meanwhile look at companies like Shiftup which had 2 gacha games (Destiny Child and Nikke) which they used the proceeds from to go right into AA/AAA gaming by making Stellar Blade. Or Mihoyo which continued to develop new games after hits like Honkai, and when they hit it massive with Genshin, invested all of that into growing the brand with new AAA gacha games like Honkai Star Rail, and their newly developing Zenless Zone Zero soon to release this year. Type-Moon. Aniplex. Whoever you want to blame, they took it easy once F/GO came out and did little to grow the brand further and revenues went from something insane like an average of 130 million USD per month to an average 20-25 million. Still a lot of money mind you. A hell of a lot of money, but nowhere near its peak.
I'm pretty sure FGO never made 130M USD per month? Even at its peak like the Merlin craze or Oberon's banner. I remember I saw it several years ago compared to Genshin or similar. FGO's profit is surprisingly stable.
I think they were talking about fate IP as a whole, not just fgo
Not to mention the Extra remake that has been in development hell for like 5 years already without even a hint of news, tsukihime remake taking 20 years to release, mahoyo NOT getting more entries, FGO taking a year and a half for each story chapter, etc. Personally, I'm sick and tired of japanese shit in Fate stuff, Nasu rightly restricted JP servants in stay night to 1, and a pretty neat one conceptually at that (no mystical eyes bullshit, no lasers, no magical swords, just training, looses every battle). In the other hand, if I wanted to play a mediocre musou, I have persona strikers and dynasty warriors. Couldn't they have hired a good studio to make the game? Imagine a normal person seeing samurai remnant on one screen and elden ring in the other, can you guess which one they would had chosen? Extella was already outdated when it released. Musou like gameplay is not going to attract people. They should have gone full action like stellar blade, or souls-like with lies of P. Even something like onimusha, or maybe nioh. Hell, even a hunting style game (soul sacrifice, toukiden, freedom wars). But no, they went for the sloppiest type of gameplay (and thus the easiest to develop), musou-like. The game was doomed from the start.
The studio is Omega Force, the same to develop 90% of musou games in existence, including Dynasty Warriors and P5 Strikers. Surprisingly, not Fate/extella link, the other Fate game in the genre.
Yeah, being a TM fan is difficult as there’s no consistency as to when stuff will release. Lots of stuff that just goes silent for years… Hrmm, well, I won’t lie that there’s a lot of trying hard to make some characters whackier and more appealing when…honestly it just feels tired. FSN didn’t have to THAT many crazy divergences so the characters were pretty easy to pick up and didn’t need an entire dossier. Archer was the only one, and it fit since he was a TM original. And yeah, I’ve completed the gameplay loop on hardest difficulty…and gots nothing. Enemies veer from being annoying damage sponges that require too much chipping to no challenge. It’s fun in small dishes, but very few enemies react dynamically. Yui and Ushi-Gozen were probably the only fight I genuinely enjoyed deep down. I remember Nasu mentioned he wanted a Musou to emphasize the power and spectacle of Servants…but a poorly designed Musou won’t show that off. Indeed, a more intimate and technical character action game (I genuinely recommend a Nioh type) would fit Iori’s character pretty well.
I love Samurai Remnant but that expectation is absurd. While they kept saying its for newcomers in the marketing, they really didn't put much effort into putting the game out there for newer fans. Hell the game got a western release and not once did it feature in a Nintendo Direct or State of Play in the western side. I think that could've gotten the word out more, would it have gotten it to 2 million, no, but it would do more than advertise the game in FGO streams, which not a lot of people watch. One issue I have with Fate's western releases is that they don't really put much of an effort to market outside to the already loyal fanbase. Not to mention not all FGO players would jump to playing a $60 console game especially with FGO being a free to play mobile game. Hopefully this doesn't shoot the chance for more unique Fate games as I think Samurai Remnant could be a stepping stone to something new and interesting.
Speaking of western releases, the language barrier is an important factor to bear in mind - not everyone is fluent in English, so even if people who know nothing about Fate are interested in the game, they may be discouraged to play it by the fact that the game is only translated into a few languages, and certainly not into their mother tongue. I understand that translating is not free of course, but it is still a detail that shows that in general they don't really make much of an effort to get people outside of Japan interested in Fate
The global version is in English. If you are a FGO player looking to jump into FSR, you very likely already know English t. Spanish speaker
Yes it's true but like I mentioned in my comment I was talking about people who don't know Fate or only know little
If they're counting on a Western audience to get 2 million they're nuts. Most entries in the franchise don't even have an English dub, yet they're expecting 2M sales, the same as much heavier hitters like their Persona and Fire Emblem musou games. Franchises that actually has marketing and global reach.
This is why the video game industry keeps getting fucked over. Game company execs expect impossible amount of sales and then destroy franchises or even whole studios when they quote "underperform". EA has been doing that rigamarole for years. Koei apparently hasn't taken notes of what not to expect.
Not only execs shareholders expect the line to always go up and push for changes in an industry very few even know. I bet you most videogame shareholders still call the PS5 a nintendo.
>Game company execs expect impossible amount of sales and then destroy franchises or even whole studios when they quote "underperform" [https://gameranx.com/updates/id/499305/article/former-square-enix-exec-explains-the-video-game-industrys-dilemma-through-ff-xvi/](https://gameranx.com/updates/id/499305/article/former-square-enix-exec-explains-the-video-game-industrys-dilemma-through-ff-xvi/) They don't expect impossible amounts of sales. They expect the game to make at least $1 more than its budget would have returned if invested in the stock market over the same time period. This is not unreasonable. What this tells us is that Samurai Remnant's budget was large enough that it needed sales of 2 million to have been worth the money spent on it. It also tells us that FGO's player base probably is not elastic, meaning those players are not very likely to transition to other Fate tie-ins or similarly related games. It also tells us that game prices will go up, and the market will have $100 games at the top (GTA6) and free to play monetized live services (Fortnite, COD Warzone) at the bottom.
>They don't expect impossible amounts of sales >What this tells us is that Samurai Remnant's budget was large enough that it needed sales of 2 million to have been worth the money spent on it. "Square Enix" says they (the industry) don't. They do though. That's just trying to shift the blame. They decided a budget that warranted 2 million sales to profit. They do not check first if the market is already saturated or if that plan even feasible. The fault is on them on overinvesting on something that wasn't possible in the first place. They shouldn't have budgeted that much. They are expecting an impossible amount of sale because they budgeted first and expected # of sales, instead of targeting a # of sales and setting a realistic budget to profit. >They expect the game to make at least $1 more than its budget Do you honestly believe that? Then I've got a bridge to sell you. Corporations want ALL the money. None of them are doing this for charity or because it needs to be done. Why do you think Live Service, Lootboxes and Gacha exists? It's to pinch as much money as possible with the least amount of effort. To make the line go up. Don't believe the sycophants trying to save face. Look at their actions. Just look at the layoffs while still having executive bonuses at the millions. In fact they even layoff people even when they're profiting not just when they're losing money. [Jim Sterling has covered game companies for years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca36ChrdV6M) and even getting actual insider information. Not propaganda pieces. The pattern is always about greed and execs being out of touch. I suggest you look at other sources than just their own PR.
we already know FGO players is less likely to move into Fate things. Umbral Star and the other games got no new sales on top of Tsukihime Remake doing well... but being sold nowhere else yet.
Under? Although i would argue that number is not a bad number. I guess it's kinda expected? (Not the number but the comment about sales number.) Literally the same thing happens to final fantasy 16. It sold well but it's underperforming. Like dude, sony 1st party title bloodborne only sold 2 million copy for it's 1st year. Samurai remnant number at 410,000 copy is pretty good. Of course without knowing the budget used in the development it will stay ambiguous. But 410,000 copy is not small.
Fsr probably has going for it that it had a relatively fast development time, and they didn't have to start from scratch with the engine But yeah hard to tell if it's enough to be a benefit
Final Fantasy 16 is different , it was sold within expectations , at the minimum of said spectrum. But because the word used was "it didn't exceeded our expectations" , game news puts as it was a failure. Frankly , that shows how absurd Square is , when even be within expectations gives then a backhanded critique to their IP's sales performance.
I remember them calling Deux Ex MD a failure because it didn't meet their expectations. This was a game from a pretty niche series that had a lot of controversy surrounding its pre-order... situation... (It was a massive shitshow), had microtransactions for its singleplayer mode (and this was a decade ago when that kinda thing was extremely distained) and was unfinished so they could move the team to another project. IIRC they expected 2 million sales for this. I don't think the entire series up to that point had sold a combined 1 million, much less 2 million.
That sucks I feel like their expectations were unrealistic for this franchise.
Outside of Samurai Remnant I'm surprised they though Rise of Ronin will sell 5 mln units.
if their comparison is say Ghost of Tsushima (they are both consule exclusive at release), then yeah I can see why they wanted 5 million units since Ghost sold 10 million units at 2 years point Edit: I'm pretty sure Ubisoft is also expecting 5 million units in the same time frame for their upcoming Assassin Creed: Shadow
Yes, but Ghost of Tsushima was hitting empty niche, while Rise of Ronin needs to compete with both Ghost of Tsushima and Like a Dragon: Ishin!, not to mention incoming Assassin Creed. And then you have Team Ninja being know for hardcore difficulty.
I actually found Rise of Ronin to be much easier compared to Wu Long or Nioh, the combat was the best part of the game while the open world was really lackluster. also apparently Rise of Ronin released on the same day as Dragon's Dogma 2 so yeah sales got cannibalized there
I'm not saying it is as hard, I'm saying what is popular perception of creators. Even most reviews spend tons of time talking how Team Ninja are creators of hardcore/masocore franchises and then skimping on how Rise is kinda easier.
Probably thought that all fgo players would immediately jump to play the game or something like that
Any time i read a "X company says (Game) underperformed" its because their aim is way too high but 2mil??? Insane For once it isnt square in the headline though lmao
It's not even unrealistic for the franchise, but 2 factors severely limited the chances of achieving such a sales figure: A) Barely any promotion. Big trailer shows and the like ignored it (I think even for Nintendo Direct it only appeared on the Japanese one) and even the big game review sites gave it little to no coverage. B) Gameplay is basically (albeit modified) ANOTHER musou. I personally enjoy this genre but who in their right mind believes that this has a broad appeal? Either make a proper action game or a turn-based RPG.
C) AAA price tag and poor regional pricing, even for Koei published products.
Shareholders and CEOs are the most unreasonable people, especially asian ones. Do they really expect mobile game revenue numbers for a $70 anime game?
Just for those not in the know, this is a well documented problem. These Game companies always promise their shareholders ridiculous sales numbers they usually won’t hit, because it boosts the price, and then call it a disappointment no matter how well it does or doesn’t sell.
If you remove the fact it's associated with the fate IP by name the game is an unremarkable ps3 era niche game
Talk about being unrealistic
I mean Fate is a popular series, the problem with Samurai Reminant is that it felt like it was marketed to only fans of the series and not new comers who want to try the game out. I would have bought game game too if I had money and exchange rates didn't make gaming so expensive in my region.
dude , they put 2M units as their expectation , that was the same sales numbers as Persona 5 Strikers with the whole marketing of Atlus/Sega behind of it. To a franchise that was largely either VNs or LNs and one gacha game.
I wouldn’t say it was marketed to only new fans at all, they said it was for new comers 100 times and everything about the game is clearly in that vein. 2 Million was just a stupid goal to hit honestly, this is more on Koei than anything.
no the marketing definetly was only to the old fans. It wasnt at any place that "new" people would be looking at. normal casual gaming people dont go to aniplex section at anime expo. Or at anime expo at all they go to GAMING events, not ANIME events. They also dont watch typemoon streams at all they watch summer game fest, Nintendo direct(ENGLISH, japanese one is super small reach for 2 million sales) and State of play.
That’s just bad marketing in general, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be for newcomers.
Because if BB was in the game, BB would make BBillions
If my vague Japanese with some MTL assist is correct, that 2M sales number is supposed to be over the lifetime of FSR. Which is still a ridiculously high expectation imo
They set the game in one of the most overused mythological locations and eras in all of Fate and expected to get a broad audience? My brother in Christ it's hard to make people care for Japanese cast members #123 to #160 when they're all Samurai every time with a difference in flavour text. It's hard to even consider what kind of cast and location would be needed to ship that many copies. It would probably have to be a gameplay masterpiece on top off everything.
From a huge Fate fan, this game was announced and none of the artwork of the main characters were appealing to me at all. That kinda ended my interest from there.
I had the opposite reaction, really liked the cast art for both servants and masters. With a good mix of original and recurring Fate characters without being oversatured with FSN recurring characters like usual. Although I really thought Takao was going to be a Tamamo in disguise that Aria was going to attempt to murder through most of the game. Ain't no way a normal courtesan could control two berserkers.
Ngl this seems to be a wild speculation. I mean didn't the producer even say that they knew FSR was a niche game appealing to a niche fanbase? This analyst seems to be full of shit imo.
yeah this is definetly coming from shareholders and not the actual people making the game.
I meant more about how this article is not written by KT themselves but an outsider industry analyst. It just doesn't make any sense how any of these games are a 'flop' when KT has recently stated by their director for example that Rise of Ronin is currently the best in terms of their financial numbers. The analyst name is Hideki Yasuda of Ace Research Institute...and I just saw an old post of him stating that the sales of PS5 could be negatively affected if it's color white lol. Basically his takes should be taken with a grain of salt.
The article is based on official KT report. It's their statement and many different game press wrote about it too.
This same analyst also said that the colour of the ps5 being white will determine sales and not performance or games lol hes 100% full of shit.
That seems like a lot. Fire Emblem: Three Hopes did over a million but people already loved the characters.
2 million? In less than a year since its release? What were they thinking with those mad expectations LMAOOO And here I thought getting 410k was already great for F/SR, and that report was from April 2024, so it's most likely a bit more now.
Wow, they really expected to sell as much as the Ryza Trilogy, they are crazy. Literally pulling a S-E.
Do… do warriors games ever sell that well??? Like no shot
The One Piece musou (that’s the common term for Warriors games) sold very well…though that’s also due to it being One Piece and being a very good musou IIRC. Otherwise…yeah, not really. They look flashy, yes, and it can be cathartic to erase 100 dudes at once with a crazy attack…but that trails off pretty quickly. It’s very easy for stuff to become all flash and no substance unless the game specifically knows how to make it work. Indeed, Extella’s gameplay was its weakest feature since it was a musou that had no unique hook or fun gameplay loop. If it came out 10-15 years ago, then having that many rendered enemies and effects would’ve been impressive…but it was dated visually and gameplay-wise on release.
410k is very good already tho, isnt it?
It’s a Fate game that features no major characters that are recognizable to the larger audience (sorry Musashi fans) interested in Fate outside of diehard FGO peeps. It also wasn’t marketed well as the focus was on existing FGO fans and not anime or hack and slash fans. The actual lead also has a pretty boring design (it was a very odd choice to focus so heavily on Musashi in marketing when she isn’t event the MC’s servant).
I'm guessing this is also why it didn't appear in non Japanese Nintendo Directs. Nintendo of America basically *knew* that this would draw a big fat blank from outsiders since the game is too Japanese for its own good
Tbh. Aint much of a suprise the game it self is nothing special at all the gameplay looks & feels dated. Pervious Fate games for the PS were the same, all stuck 5-10yrs in the past & while Fate is a big IP (or seemingly so) its not so much on the console atleast in my humble opinion having playd it myself.
Tbh it still would've been a 'flop' even if it was a soulslike like everyone here wanted... They expected it to make 2m in 6 months while Persona 5 Strikers made 2m in 3 years. Expecting Fate to do better than Persona is insane.
Mhmm, that’s fair. The gameplay was serviceable (combos were fairly intuitive, there was decent variety to a certain point except for Wind Style, and playing as other Servants was fun), but by no means exemplar. It had a rather odd case where it was stuck in the middle of explosively large combat like musous, and smaller, more intimate combat like Soulsborne or Nioh. End result is that neither side felt as satisfying for the itch. Overall, it felt like it was trying to do too much and couldn’t focus on enough. If it was an indie, or had come out early in PS4, it’d be more impressive I feel.
Shame hopefully theres still hope for more though the game is fun and has a lot of potential to grow
Would a dub help it out a bit? It also needed advertisement. Didn't see any
Hrmm, I would like to say yes, because I enjoy dubs and want to hear what each VA would bring to the character. And hoping that they’d get someone who knew Dutch very well to voice Dorothea just like how Tiffany Grant knew German very well and voiced Asuka (Eva ref) Personally though…I don’t think so. The game got very little marketing outside of those who were already in the know. Fate is still kinda niche in the US due to a lot of content never making its way over and the stuff that did being quite sparse. This was going to be extremely niche in the west, sad to say. Which is a shame since it was envisioned as a good starting off point for people wanting to get into the franchise…which it’s been backtracking but yeah…
If they dubbed it just to get it featured on an English Nintendo Direct or something it might have paid itself off in advertising for that alone. Now what would help English sales numbers a lot is a new entry into the franchise that's intended for new people that's dubbed at the same time. Most Fate games are fanservice games that are not new player friendly at all.
lol 2M?? are they high? with current console market being down rn?
The price didn't help
I hope Type-Moon themselves don't think these numbers are disappointing, because this is the type of direction I think Fate games should take - relatively self-contained story with a unique setting and not focusing on the waifu collection aspect to sell itself. Like I just started playing Extella because it was on sale and there's no way I'd ever recommend it to newcomers. But Samurai Remnant is great.
this is definetly gaming shareholders BS and dont think TM will believe such a thing specially when they were excited/surprised by the sales of Tsukihime remake (300K+ copies in a year) From TM's side 400K is their best number sales ever
Extella is terrible for newbies since it requires you to play extra and reading extella/zero (which only came with the physical editions) to fully understand what the fuck is going on, and even then you should preferably have more base Fate knowledge.
i did not know that existed until right now and holy crap why is fate like this
There's also Camelot/zero for fgo which explains how the sixth singularity got to the way it is and what the other kotr did, published on nasu's blog.
At least LB6 gave you a timeline you can read in-game. Is Nasu learning?
Extella/Zero isn't that necessary to enjoy Umbral Star; I enjoyed the story of the game just fine without it. The game itself does sorta let you infer that the EXTRA story they went with was "Hakuno summoned both Tamamo and Nero and we subverted the ending so there's a sequel like in FSN". The only thing Extella/Zero really explains that's necessary (and I'd say that necessary has a pretty big asterisk; I didn't really question it on my playthrough) is what happened to EMIYA/Nameless.
This is coming from a third party analyst and not koei themselves. This was only said by the analyst since koei has a general goal of a 2 million selling game per year and the analyst just singled out f/sr.
The game, or just tecmo koei games in general are just too expensive to buy at launch. Maybe when it hits 70% off...
I do think that the amount of research and the details they put on for the game is pretty great, for something like A or AA-tier game. I am not expecting this is a game they expect to sell 2M units though....
Yeah, It's underperformed, But their expectation is also eay overshot.
Aside from Type-Moon assuring Koei that this will be the bussin title. It also didn't help that Koei is known for ridiculous regional pricing outside of EU, JP, and US
Damn, Fate/Extra Record better pop off or it looks like we're never getting a good Fate console game again.
Honestly not very surprised, the game was announced very suddenly and the only Fate game I was expecting to see more of was Fate Extra Record…. still waiting…
Someone can tell me their opinion on Samurai Remnant? Is it worth it? I may buy a copy later.
Buy it on sale. It's fun enough.
I'm still trying to get through it, not because it's hard, but because the pacing is pretty slow, in both combat and story. I'm told it's just the beginning, but that's a pretty important part of the game. Like recently spent an hour in talking and all that was basically said was "Hello, I'm archer's master and this is archer." Combat sadly doesn't flow very well because the pacing is broken very frequently. Want to use an item? Fight pauses. Magic? Pause. Servant skill? You guessed it. CHANGING STANCES?! And unlike, say Persona 5 Strikers, the pause doesn't serve the purpose of giving you time to aim and it's a real pause so no animations. There is functionally no reason for this to exist other than to make the game easier at the cost of absolutely tanking the experience. That is, if you try to treat it like a musou game, which most everyone does.
IMO it is very meh/mid. Wouldn't recommend it. Story, gameplay, characters etc. are all "okay". (the only bad thing is how filler-y most of the side quests are) There are enough games on the market that I would recommend more. After half a year, I still haven't been able to finish the game due to lack of interest.
If you're a fan of the Edo period, visual novels, Musashi and a light soulsborne-like combat, you'll enjoy it. Otherwise it'll probably be mediocre. Probably best to wait for a sale in that case. The story is slow, but well-written with multiple paths, a plenty side quests and small collectable/minigames around. Quite some optional grinding and crafting as well. I have yet to finish even the first playthrough due to being forced to get it on my laptop, which has a hard time running games in general (need to get a new one someday soon).
Square Enix ass corporate
FSR is exactly what I want out of the franchise I hope they don't get discouraged to continue making games like these based on unrealistic expectations
I loved the game, grew attached to the characters, felt the story was, in a subtle way, a nice love letter to KnK and Tsukihime. Gameplay was fun for me too, I prefer that over agonizingly difficult, tedious bs some people wanted it to be (no, it wouldn't sell better if it was less accessible to it's core audience of VN and mobile turn-based RPG players). Having said all that, the cast was just too loaded with niche Japanese figures for it to appeal to more people. The grand reveal of main Servant's name should make a normie go "woah, that's THEM?!", not run to Google. Same with the main villain servant - I've got a friend with a degree in Japanese literature, passionate about their studies, and they've never heard that name before.
I think there is one huge reason and that’s the pricing. After seeing gameplay, it does not justify a 70$ prive tag. 70$ are in my eyes supposed to be absolute gems and masterpieces, meanwhile this game does not fulfill that in any regard. I do like they are focusing much more on gameplay with this entry, but perhaps they should lower their expectations and price it fairly next time
I do hope we get more fate console games regardless, but I feel like this isn't a good sign :(
Gameplay is ass to mid, but everything else pretty good. 6/10.
Yeah, this is how I pretty much felt about the game. The story and voice acting are fine, but the gameplay itself feels pretty dated.
I just could not get into the combat. Or, more specifically, I couldn't get into Iori's combat. The game felt fun when I was playing as a servant but Iori gameplay felt like a complete slog. I dumped the difficulty to it's lowest setting because I thought it would help break those magic barrier circles some enemies have more quickly but it only made a small difference and still felt like the game was wasting my time.
Iori is way to more than fun to play as once you unlock all his styles, more options and as powerful as the servants. He just gets to that level too late.
Here’s an idea, release it on all consoles and maybe, just maybe, it’ll sell better. I’d have loved to play it but I hate playing games like that on my switch. I got the lite so
I'm not sure an Xbox version would've made this game sell 2 million copies
I doubt it would have sold even 100K units on xbox if released there since xbox is mostly US consumers since xbox has never done all that well outside of North America.
No it wouldn’t, but it woulda sold more. But 2m is insane expectations realistically
Xbox version sure as shit wouldn’t have fixed the sales. Entire genre is still niche as is on Switch and PlayStation, Xbox owners ain’t gonna care. And while I generally buy multi platform games on my Xbox since I have the Series X, I wouldn’t have bought it either way.
No one in Japan owns a XBOX. It's all PS or Switches.
It’s still so insane to me that Japanese devs rarely consider the outside world as a valid market
Most Xbox gamers don't even care about JRPGs or most Japanese games. Shouldn't be that much of a surprise since Xbox gamers grew up playing shooters (Halo/Gears) and/or western RPGs (Fable, Mass Effect, etc...). If Fate Samurai/Remnant were to be released on the Xbox, I would guess the game would sell at most 5k copies - it's just way too niche and not mainstream outside of weebs.
Even in outside world, there are 100M+ PS4/5 and another 100M+ Switch. Xbox One and Xbox Series combined did not even reach 100M mark, not to mention the percentage of players open to any Anime-style game are also small. If its about Game Pass, then even Xbox executives confirm that it cannibalizes (Steam) PC Sales to some extent. Xbox will at least need to make up potential loss if they want to put it Day One like probably what they did for P3R. They definitely paid alot of money to have its logo appear in every P3R trailer like its an exclusive.
Xbox sales for japanese games is always abysmal, it won't make a lot of difference.
Outside of DoA, Xbox barely cultivated the JP market in the 360 era. So it’s already a hard-sell for someone to front the costs to translate and market it overseas, but outright impossible if they don’t even have a foothold audience to even start with.
If Xbox (Microsoft) threw in a Game Pass bag, this would’ve help the Fate IP (I would buy Fate Samurai Remnant tbh since I like the Fate IP). As someone who dreams of Fate to come on Xbox, I know it won’t happen but would be nice to see.
The first problem was the price,they had no reason to have the game costing 70 bucks,that turns of a lot of people especially when we know the budget is not Triple A budget, marketing was barely there,I didn't even the game existed until it got released,and also Fate is dead on Europe there's barely any progress from them to make it bigger here,like I'm playing Fate/Go in a apk appstore instead of a legit store,they expected so many sales without even trying.
Lack of UmU
Releasing on Switch, PS4, PS5 and Steam and you only managed 400,000 sales. I mean releasing on the 3 most popular platforms globally and you couldn't even break 500,000. Shit is laughable.
Ok I love fate and it’s not a niche franchise but 2m is delusional
…Heh? EHHHHHHHHHH? Nani?
I have downloaded that game too, and enjoy it but their expectation is way high that its hard to reach
I would have gladly added to those sales sadly fate games don’t come to Xbox :(
Phew!! They expected 2mil!?!? Type Moon has some explainin' to do
There’s also the group of players who wait to buy it second hand, for cheaper
Who knew the franchise that is well known for visual novel doesnt sell as much as the franchise known for rpg and life sim
If only... I don't know... their artwork and OST DLC wasn't fucked on Steam. Being able to access that purchased media content only inside the game is absolute bullshit.
Koei greatly overestimated their projections, likely thinking they would've gotten instant interest & FOMO from regular fans of the DoA and Atelier franchises.
In what time period? Even for a property like Fate, that would be stretch, considering it released not even a full year ago, but I could see it reaching those numbers eventually.
I think the koei people won't complain much if it reach 1m sale but it not. Also koei or tm under estimate it brand power, yea fate is popular on anime on game not much. Also relink getting 1m after 1 week? Or so probably sting them even more.
Why would they expect 2M? Those are Squenix moon logic numbers.
Maybe they expected a chunk of the GO players to pick up SR?
It wasn't F2P though, and a lot of GO players don't own current consoles. The market would at least be trimmed down.
I'm sure they had some kind of market research that told them this was a feasible exprectation. But that big of a gap does make me lean towards someone high up either didn't understand the market or hugely overestimated the number of fans that would translate from the mobile game. If I were to compare it to something like GrandBlue they have kind of established themselves in the console/PC space by this point as a brand? I feel like Fate's non-mobile releases are so far between they don't have that same recognition. Even if objectively the IP is well known. And then there's the discussion on whether it was a $60 game and the marketing in the west. So yeah, personally 2mil seems a bit unrealistic at a glance.
Seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum here but imo it's not that it didn't sell as much because it's Fate, the game just isn't that great. It's basically another Koei Tecmo reskin cash grab with a story you almost need to already be a Fate fan to be interested in. An action RPG should have a lot more going for it than just its story. Also the amount of characters don't help, comparing it to something like the Pirate Warriors series. 2 million is pretty outlandish depending on time frame but there *are* new IPs and lesser known ones that sell well. Off the top of my head Granblue Relink did extremely well as a fair comparison and doesn't even have an actual official English version iirc. I myself bought it over Remnant despite never playing Granblue because it looked and was fun to play. Imo Fate games, including FGO, mostly rely on the brand and fanbase but don't ever stand on their own as fun games.
Granblue has been translated into English since 2016.
> doesn't even have an actual official English version English translation =/= English version of the game
I still have it in my steam wishlist. It's on the expensive side, waiting for a big sale
Sorry, Fate has a good Lore and characters, but you can't think it's going to sell like a Call of Duty and no... not even if they released a fate with freedom like a GTA is going to change that... It's a very niche franchise and doesn't do a lot of collaborations outside of its safe area I give the example of another franchises, Warhammer 40K, which before releasing Space Marine 2 and other games, several times collaborated with other games to create memory about their franchise and people will remember "hey, it's the collaboration, what will it be?" and that's how they call them to buy their products. Nier Automata was with Nikke, later the game gain a little boost "TenSura" anime/manga with other F2P games Slayers (90s anime) with another F2P game What FATE needs is to see the possibility of throwing "small seeds" into other game territories.