In a 2011 Iwata Asks interview, Shigeru Miyamoto expressed discontent at the Virtual Boy being marketed as a video game console. He believed it was simply a novelty toy and that it succeeded in that field despite its commercial failure as a game console:
"It was the kind of toy to get you excited and make you think, 'This is what we can do now!' […] as just a fun toy, it's a big success if you break just 50,000 […] [Its] sales generated some buzz, and crossed 100,000, then 200,000, then 500,000-quite a good pattern […] [But] when you think of it as a gaming platform, it becomes a failure."
In Febuary 2024, Monopoly Go! achieved a significant milestone by officially surpassing $2 billion USD in lifetime revenue. Remarkably, this achievement occurred just ten months after the game's launch and a mere three months after reaching the $1 billion mark.
In December 2021, the number of shipments and digital sales of Bravely Default II surpassed one million units across both the Nintendo Switch version (which alone had sold 950,000 copies in August) and the Steam version, making it the fastest-selling entry in the series. To celebrate this achievement, the official Bravely Default Twitter account shared commemorative artwork.
In a 2005 interview with the game's producer Koji Igarashi published in the official Konami strategy guide, he explained the decision to change the series' title in the domestic Japanese market from "Castlevania" back to "Akumajo Dracula".
The title change to Castlevania in Japan initially occurred because the Akumajo Dracula games enjoyed a larger market share in Europe and America compared to Japan. Consequently, more reports and information about the games were available in those regions, and they were released there first. In the recent past, news from outside Japan was harder to access, but with the advent of the internet, Japanese users could now easily stay informed. However, there was a concern that Japanese players might not immediately recognize the equivalence between Castlevania and Akumajo Dracula, so the main title of the previous game Lament of Innocence was changed to Castlevania in Japan to address this.
Subsequently, for Curse of Darkness, the decision was made to revert to the original title because the team felt that the Castlevania name had become associated with trilogies, inadvertently making it challenging for fans to find information about the Akumajo Dracula titles. The team wanted to ensure clarity for Japanese fans and clear up any confusion among Akumajo Dracula fans about if Castlevania was supposed to be Akumajo Dracula.
During the pre-release to Pikmin 4, many fans of the franchise were upset that the game did not recieve a larger marketing push from Nintendo, given its spotty sales history. In response, a large swathe of Pikmin fans took to the PixelStar service (which allows individuals to cheaply buy temporary advertising space that would usually be reserved for wealthy corporations in Times Square in New York City) to display Pikmin memes and fan art as a form of unsanctioned advertising. The total amount of money spent by Pikmin fans was estimated by MeriStation USA to be $300 minimum.
Pikmin 4 would end up becoming the best selling installment of the Pikmin franchise. This result most likely has much more to do with the popularity of the Nintendo Switch relative to the GameCube and Wii U, but given how major an advertising space like Times Square is, it isn't completely impossible that the PixelStar advertising could have contributed to the game's sales.
Despite Nintendo's current image as a family-friendly company, their initial success came from ties to organized crime. When the company was founded in 1889, hanafuda, which Nintendo manufactured cards for, was becoming increasingly controversial due to it being one of few betting games not covered by the Japanese Empire's anti-gambling laws, resulting in it becoming popular among the yakuza. While other companies were slowly exiting the hanafuda business as a result, founder Fusajiro Yamauchi pressed on, resulting in Nintendo becoming the country's most successful playing card manufacturer thanks mostly to strong sales among gang members.
A TV adaptation of the de Blob franchise was in production around 2010 to be aired on the SyFy TV channel on a new children's block, which would've used Blob in its branding. This deal got so far that SyFy Kids' logo was included on trailers and promotional items for de Blob 2. Due to the sequel's underperformance, the cartoon would be cancelled, and given Blob's prevalence in preliminary branding and the lack of knowledge on what other series were being planned if any, the cartoon's cancellation likely also led to the SyFy Kids block being cancelled too. SyFy Kids would later be revived in 2013, but airing on the Asian and South African versions of KidsCo with a lineup almost entirely comprised of reruns and syndicated programming.
When the Super Famicom first launched in Japan, it was so hard to get that Nintendo had to hold a lottery for which employees would get a Super Famicom. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Mario series, and Yuji Horii, creator of the Dragon Quest series, claimed that they were each only able to get one.
In 2012, an HD compilation of the first two Yakuza games was ported to the Wii U. This port of the games performed so poorly that it sold less than 2000 copies in its first week of release, likely due to the fact that both games were already ported to the PlayStation 3 where more players already owned it. However, series producer Toshihiro Nagoshi stated that this port of the game was not done to generate sales, but as an "experiment" to see how people would respond to the games being on the Wii U.
Nintendo planned to release the 64DD in North America and even manufactured test units with fully translated BIOSes and functional region locking. However, the idea was ultimately dropped due to the add-on's low sales in Japan. Concrete proof of these plans wouldn't become public until 2016, when YouTuber Jason Lindsey (a.k.a. MetalJesusRocks) found a surviving test unit and verified its legitimacy with former Nintendo of America employee Mark DeLoura.
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Following the PlayStation 2's success with non-gamers in the UK, the Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK attempted a radical rebrand to appeal to more mainstream audiences, specifically members of the rowdy, irresponsible British "chav" subculture who bought the console primarily for its DVD functionality or a small sampling of titles. As a result, the magazine's content shifted into more lewd, violent, snarky, and misogynistic coverage, sometimes bordering on pornographic. The most infamous section in this magazine's history would come in a section titled "Rate Your Mate", where women (with an explicit rule against male entrants) would be asked to submit risqué photographs of themselves with the promise that their boyfriends would receive some kind of prize, and then rate their body based on "graphics, gameplay, and lifespan" as if it were a video game. The magazine would eventually revert to a more appropriate gaming publication by the release of the PlayStation 3 and its final rebranding to PlayStation Official Magazine - UK.
Chex Quest was based on the engine of Doom - the engine could be officially licensed thanks to the game technically not making a profit of it's own as a free game, only profit for the Chex cereal, and the release of Quake rendering the old Doom engine obsolete.
The bankruptcy of THQ is often pinned on the uDraw peripheral for the Wii - this is not completely true, as the Wii version of the uDraw was highly successful. However, the HD versions of the uDraw, released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, were a killing blow to the company (even if not the sole cause of it's bankruptcy), as it was heavily overproduced compared to the size of the audience for casual games on those platforms and an even lower amount of uDraw-supported titles on those platforms relative to the Wii. Supposedly, the HD uDraw was greenlit by THQ's family division, PlayTHQ, without proper permission from the main branch of the company without even knowing what games could or would be made on the hardware.
There are two different candidates for the video game console with the longest lifespan, from official introduction to discontinuation, and which one holds the distinction depends on one's metrics.
In terms of support from its original developer, the longest-lasting video game console is the Famicom, the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Famicom was introduced in 1983 and remained on store shelves until 2003, lasting twenty years on the market.
However, when counting support from third party manufacturers, the distinction instead goes to the Sega Master System. While Sega incrementally discontinued the device between 1991 and 1994 depending on the region, Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy received a license from Sega to continue manufacturing clones of the Master System due to its high popularity in Brazil. These clone consoles continue to be manufactured in the present day, decades after the original Master System's launch in 1985.
In Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn NFT game revolving around breeding, training, and selling axolotl-like creatures called Axies for real money, more experienced players will rent out their Axies to less experienced players in exchange for a portion of the less experienced player's later profits. This feature contains heavy similarities to sharecropping, a real-life practice often described by its use in the United States from the Reconstruction era into the mid-20th century as a post-abolition equivalent to slavery. Due to many of the low level players taking loans coming from low-income countries such as the Philippines and Brazil, Axie Infinity has been described by some analysts as "digital colonialism".
EyeToy producer Jamie MacDonald claims that the biggest complement he received over EyeToy: Play was when a marketing director of Nintendo of Europe told him the company was "absolutely gutted" over the casual title's success on Sony hardware in the UK.
On February 3, 2023, 9 days after Forspoken's release, Square Enix released the outline of the Results Briefing held on that day, which showed some insight on the publisher's takeaways concerning its recent game releases.
While the briefing primarily focused on the financial results of numerous underperforming "small and mid-sized titles" that released in the quarter of October-December 2022 to try and fill the gap for declining net sales in the "HD Games sub-segment", the company decided to make a comment on the sales and reception for Forspoken. On page 6 of the outline, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda stated the following:
"Reviews of “FORSPOKEN,” which we released on January 24, 2023, have been challenging. However, the game has also received positive feedback on its action features, including its parkour and combat capabilities, so it has yielded results that will lead to improvement of our development capabilities of other games in the future. That said, its sales have been lackluster, and while the performance of new titles with February and March release dates will be the ultimate determinant, we see considerable downside risk to our FY2023/3 earnings."
The effects of the game's negative reception would come to fruition on February 28, when Square Enix announced that its developer, Luminous Productions, would be absorbed back into Square Enix on May 1 to "further bolster the competitive prowess of the Group's development studios". Despite Forspoken's failure, Luminous Productions said that they would remain committed to the game in the meantime, releasing patch updates and working on the game's upcoming DLC "In Tanta We Trust", which would later release on May 26, after the studio's closure.
In December 2021, the number of shipments and digital sales of Bravely Default II surpassed one million units across both the Nintendo Switch version (which alone had sold 950,000 copies in August) and the Steam version, making it the fastest-selling entry in the series. To celebrate this achievement, the official Bravely Default Twitter account shared commemorative artwork.
During the pre-release to Pikmin 4, many fans of the franchise were upset that the game did not recieve a larger marketing push from Nintendo, given its spotty sales history. In response, a large swathe of Pikmin fans took to the PixelStar service (which allows individuals to cheaply buy temporary advertising space that would usually be reserved for wealthy corporations in Times Square in New York City) to display Pikmin memes and fan art as a form of unsanctioned advertising. The total amount of money spent by Pikmin fans was estimated by MeriStation USA to be $300 minimum.
A TV adaptation of the de Blob franchise was in production around 2010 to be aired on the SyFy TV channel on a new children's block, which would've used Blob in its branding. This deal got so far that SyFy Kids' logo was included on trailers and promotional items for de Blob 2. Due to the sequel's underperformance, the cartoon would be cancelled, and given Blob's prevalence in preliminary branding and the lack of knowledge on what other series were being planned if any, the cartoon's cancellation likely also led to the SyFy Kids block being cancelled too. SyFy Kids would later be revived in 2013, but airing on the Asian and South African versions of KidsCo with a lineup almost entirely comprised of reruns and syndicated programming.
Nintendo planned to release the 64DD in North America and even manufactured test units with fully translated BIOSes and functional region locking. However, the idea was ultimately dropped due to the add-on's low sales in Japan. Concrete proof of these plans wouldn't become public until 2016, when YouTuber Jason Lindsey (a.k.a. MetalJesusRocks) found a surviving test unit and verified its legitimacy with former Nintendo of America employee Mark DeLoura.
