Soul Calibur 5: Poor Launch Sales in Japan
Soul Calibur 5 was very promising in its promotions. The characters looked great and the promo trailers may be a tad too flashy but they are not shabby at all.
Its launch in Japan was not so great, though. In fact, it was so poor that it sold only less than half of the units sold by Soul Calibur 4 during the first week. For the week ending on February 5, 2012, the sales figures for Japan were very disheartening to say the least. It was not what we expected for Namco Bandai’s title.
The PS3 version was not that bad on its first week. It reached number 2 by selling 34,328 units. The Xbox 360 version, however, sold only 7,679 units. Looking back, Soul Calibur 4 was able to sell 74,607 units on the PS3. It also did very well on the Xbox 360 with 34,786 units sold after launching in July of 2008. Now, let us do a little math. We are looking at 42,007 units in all sold by Soul Calibur 5 in its first week going against 109,393 units sold by its predecessor on its first week in 2008. There was a whopping 61 percent decrease in sales just by looking at the first week.
In the UK, Soul Calibur 5 places fifth in the chart that covers all formats. However, its position may also be endangered by upcoming titles this February 10, 2012.
If the disappointing sales turn out to be international, the title is in big trouble. We thought that the trailers could have been done better but would have never guessed that the game will suffer such a poor showing. We are hoping that the game will still be able to recover in the next few weeks. We want to see it to at least rack up decent numbers.
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