Anyone interested in speculating how many sales Capcom are forecasting for Monster Hunter World?
I know there was a thread on it but the recent Q&A cleared up something.
Here is what they forecasted back at the end of FY3/2016 for FY3/2017:
The unannounced titles already had sales targets. Here are the revealed titles at the first half of their earnings results:
Interestingly, they were able to track demo downloads of RE7:
But anyway, Capcom had forecasted 10 million sales from New Titles for that FY.
They were lucky to beat their forecast due to Resident Evil re-releases because all their major titles failed their sales targets.
RE7 had 3.5 million sales, Dead Rising 4 is less than 1 million, MHXX 3DS is only at 1.5 million now.
With this FY:
They list only two New major titles, one unannounced.
They state it here:
They are going again for a 10 million sales forecast for New titles:
However, they have only two major titles compared to three last FY, and that there are only 37 New titles releasing this FY compared to 42 last FY.
Finally, to get to the point, here is what Capcom said in their Q&A which most likely points to why they haven't revealed their forecast yet for Monster Hunter World.
Q: The full-year unit sales guidance for new Consumer titles of 10.3 million units is on par with the previous fiscal year; however, considering Resident Evil 7 biohazard was launched last year, is this number not bullish? What is your outlook going forward, including your expectations for this year's Monster Hunter: World?
A: We are confident that we will be able to achieve this number because the full-year unit sales guidance for new games consists of 37 titles (counted on a SKU-basis) that include re-releases of catalog titles for current-generation hardware. Further, we have received positive feedback on Monster Hunter: World, which was well received when announced at E3. Going forward, we will maximize sales by carrying out proactive measures not only in the Japanese market, but in the North American and European markets as well.
They were waiting on feedback from the west for the reveal Monster Hunter World so now that will probably be factored into their forecast.
How much are they really expecting though? Are they also expecting their re-releases to generate a lot of sales? They didn't think that last FY where their three major new titles accounted for 80% of their sales target.
So far with this FY, MvCi only accounts for around 20% of the sales target. I'm guessing that they expect their re-releases of the following games to account for around 3 million sales? Resident Evil Revelations (PS4, XB1), Resident Evil Revelations 1 and 2 (Switch), Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen (PS4, XB1).
I'm thinking that at their next quarter earnings release in October, their forecast for Monster Hunter World would range from 3-4M, I expect 4 million if they can get it released on all platforms: PC, PS4, XB1. Otherwise, less than 4 million if they miss the PC release for this FY.
I know that's slightly less than how the 3DS titles have performed, but it's releasing in their 4th quarter and they haven't outlined yet how they will market the game in the west.
For example, if they decide to do a demo. They should not do it like RE7 where people spent hours looking for things that weren't there because Capcom didn't reveal that their demo would receive patches that added more content to the demo.
I know it helped spread the word of the game but it had people get burnt out when they finally released the full version of the demo months later after people had most likely spent more hours on the first build of the demo compared to the actual retail release of the game.
I know RE7 isn't MH, the point was that Capcom isn't brilliant with regards to their marketing.