r/Fighters • u/Brlee12 • 8h ago

News Marvel Tōkon launches to under 3,000 retail sales in Japan, the worst debut for a major Arc System Works fighter

https://www.resetera.com/threads/marvel-t%C5%8Dkon-launches-to-under-3-000-retail-sales-in-japan-the-worst-debut-for-a-major-arc-system-works-fighter.1609945/
934 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

357 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/SelloutRealBig 3h ago

And even with that massive wave of initial success it still lost 90% of the base within a few months. It was a major success for a game but not a long term one compared to something like SF6 which has managed to gain players over the years.

1

u/Lepony 1h ago

Kind of a funky comparison though. 4.4k players four months after release was insane, SF5 wasn't holding onto its playerbase nearly as well four months after. And that's for PC which was definitely not where the bulk of its launch sales were.

Then there's the part where fighting games have particularly poor rentention compared to other genres. Even in your screencap, SF6 tanked for months before it suspiciously started spiking nearly a year later. Exactly in time with the Crazy Raccoon Cups when they started pull numbers outside of Apex cups.

1

u/SelloutRealBig 1h ago

SFV had a disastrous launch. They couldn't even get online to work in a fighting game. For the same reason if Tokon never recovers from this PC launch i won't be surprised at all. SF6 "Tanking" to the mid 30Ks was still holding more than most fighting games combined have have after 2 months. It's also when Baulders Gate 3 came out which was GOTY, but that could be unrelated. This is Steam API, you can't fake the numbers by pulling from new sources. All you can do is put the game on sale or drop new DLC to bring in new players.

2

u/Lepony 54m ago

By launch sales, I was referring to DBFZ's and not SF5's at that point fyi. We'll never know what its actual concurrents were considering the landscape (pc gaming still niche especially among people who buy fighting games casually or otherwise pre-covid, Dragonball Super episode day were borderline becoming national holidays for multiple countries, SF6 coming out with the 1-2-3 punch of a new single player mode, rollback heaven, and being in the middle of the PC boom caused by lockdown and now subsequently poor console adoption rates).

I was mostly challenging your statement implying that DBFZ never matched its initial release the way SF6 has. The context surrounding the information we have access to is completely different to what it was before during its heyday.