Just.... smurf you Capcom.

[Polnareff]

AAI may not have sold well enough to warrent it coming out, but the first one did well enough to warrent 2 and 3 coming out. Not really sure what your point in bringing up the spin off likely not doing so well means.

It means that Capcom poured more of a budget into AAI (it having totally new resources compared to the older games) and it sold like poop here by those standards. It apparently did okay enough in Japan to warrant an AAI2. But that doesn't matter so much, and I'll mention why later in the post. The reason why I brought that up was because AA was brought up as having sold well. It did, but the budget was kinda low, you have to admit. They started out as GBA games, after all. The games could have sold like 50K copies and still did okay. Like I said before, the story was the bulk of the work.

The other point I was trying to make, and failed to, was that if a full fledged BoF came out and did the same numbers it did before, it would lose money for Capcom. Let's face it, BoF isn't a blockbuster by any means. The only reason the first one sold anything in the US is because it had Square's name on it from when Woolsey translated the game and they published it. In Japan it fared better.

Firstly, the VG numbers match up pretty closely with the Capcom numbers, so I figured it was a safe bet to use them.

Also, 15 games includes the re-releases and ports. There have been only five original titles. That leaves for 9 ports and remakes.

Yes, I mentioned the second part of this in my earlier post. I mean, 3 million between 15 games, only five of which are original, is flipping crazy. If they made the same sales now, it'd be considered a flop since game costs keep ballooning. Just like they did from the transition from the SNES era to the PSX era.

In addition, from the wiki article on BoF III....

Breath of Fire III was met with a mostly positive response in Japan, with Famitsu Weekly awarding it 28 out of 40 possible points,[27] while Dengeki PlayStation Magazine awarded it a 79% average.[34] The game would go on to sell 425,000 copies in the region in 1997, making it the 24th most-bought game that year,[35] as well as qualifying it for Sony's "PlayStation the Best" distinction, which allowed it to be re-released in December 2000 at a reduced price.[2]

But......the English version of the game pretty much seemed to kill a lot of the money the JP version would have made. One really big thing is that Capcom didn't make too many copies of the game anyway, so right off the bat it was a fairly hard game to find.

There's also the licenses they had to clear, as well as hiring Bowne to help them translate the game, after the in-house disaster that was BoF2's translation.

A telling thing later was that when the PSP version came out, somebody (Sven?) talked about how on the Capcom forums that getting permission from Bowne at the time to let Capcom re-release the game for Europe was a huge pain in the ass. I thought this was interesting, since they also helped translate Phoenix Wright (for proof, beat the game and look at the credits) not long after. Bowne was going through a name change at the time this happened. I think they're called.....Lionsbridge or something now. BoFIII for PSP didn't get cleared for the US though because of Sony. And ANOTHER thing is that a couple years ago, Capcom wanted to put III on PSN; they couldn't get Lionsbridge or whatever it's called now to let them use their translation. This was also discussed on Capcom-Unity. So that's the reason why IV is up there, but not III. I think III is on the JP PSN though.

[/Quote]Assuming BoF1 DID sell that much (I still doubt it), this means that it should be 2 million divided by 14, which is around 143K. Keep in mind this is 143K a game, assuming they sold evenly. This isn't that great by RPG standards, since RPGs have huge groups working on them, and they normally take longer to complete. p/Quote]

BoF 2, Japanese SNES release again according to the Wiki article on it in relation to Japanese only sales....

and it would go on to sell a total of 350,000 copies in the region by the end of 1995.

BoF IV in Japan...

334,000

So yeah, the lower average pretty much comes from the constant remakes and ports not selling as well, the main entries seemed to be doing just fine. Remeber, all those numbers are only Japanese sales, not world wide.

And lining that up with your comments on BoF IV cutting corners to keep budget down, I don't see how they couldn't have made a profit with those sales.

And final note on the PC version of BoF IV...

while the Japanese version sold enough copies to qualify for the "Quality1980" label, and was subsequently re-released on July 8, 2005.[

Now I can't find what that label even means, but for game to 'sell well enough for a re-release' sounds to me like the game was doing pretty well.

Any game like that can sell well enough for a re-release but not a full-fledged sequel. I have to wonder how many it has to sell to qualify for this label, but if it's more than I'm thinking, then that just helps my argument even more.

You don't re-release a game if it didn't sell well in the first place.

The Idea that people weren't buying this trout doesn't at all add up with their actions relating to it.

I beg to differ. Back when Capcom was a more unwise company, they would re-release games and make sequels to them even if they didn't do well, just to see if they could get some of them to finally stick. The best example I can think of is Darkstalkers, which to most people at the time it came out, was the bastard child of SF. But it was kept going as a pet project and labor of love. This labor of love never truly took off though, despite having a lot of games to its name. Even the recent re-release flopped, after people requested for it to be re-released again with online play. Star Gladiator and Rival Schools, especially Rival Schools, were victims of this as well.

Behavior like this has almost caused them to become bankrupt at least twice. Once right before Resident Evil came out and saved their asses (oddly enough, they faced bankruptcy from squandering most of their funds on making excess SNES carts.....I trout you not), and another time in 2003, at the same time their real-estate venture failed (yes, Capcom had a real-estate branch at one point). That led to most of the Capcom 5 being cancelled.

Edit: And the wiki dates show a two year gap between Dragon Quarter and Command Misison releases.

Yes, but DQ's development did indeed spill over into Command Mission. Command Mission, for whatever stupid reason, had a longer total development time than DQ. Apparently it started when Cap was about 70% done with DQ. The same team made both. There was a thread talking about it on my old home forum, SNK-Capcom.com, before the entire forum got wiped the hell out and replaced with a new one. For the record, it is only a one and a half year gap.