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The story
The action game Wolverine surged to #1 on the North American PS Store sales chart, sparking discussion on 5ch’s Hardware & Industry (Geha) board. Since official sales figures haven’t been released, posters used the so-called “Alinea method” — estimating units sold by working backward from the number of reviews — and assuming a 2% review rate, an estimated figure of 1.95 million units took on a life of its own, with some comparing it to Death Stranding 2 (2.5 million units including PC). Meanwhile, the game sits at only #6 in Japan’s domestic ranking, and opinions were split over why there’s such a gap between its worldwide success and its domestic sales.
What people said
Wouldn't be surprised if someone's cooking the numbers, honestly.
You mean like how the Switch 2 can hit #1 while only selling 6,000 units?
What's that, the "Alinea method"?
That's a big drop from Spider-Man.
Ah, I see — that's why people are saying it beat Death Stranding 2 (2.5 million including PC).
That's way too fast to be trading it in
Nobody wants to keep it around?
Because you can beat it in as little as 10 hours.
"Our own product sold well on our own store" — so what? That's my only reaction
If you want to brag, bring me Amazon numbers or something
Well, about 80% of PlayStation game sales go through the PS Store, so…
If it flopped there, that'd be the real problem
The question is how it's doing in Japan
Japan's a special market where young people are so broke they only play free-to-play games
Japan's PS Store is the only one where multiple free-to-play titles crack the top 10
This is the only demand out there
If anything, PlayStation is the platform where you can play almost every big-name title
LOL it's only Japan where it didn't even crack the top 5
Japanese PS users are finished
I recently realized Japan is just its own isolated Galápagos market
The reviews are too low too, who knows how far it'll actually sell
I'd bet this is the kind of number that triggers a contract review, personally
I'm playing it too, and it's honestly a pretty fun game
Not a peep from the official side
It hasn't even been a week yet
Can it beat FE (Fire Emblem)?
Hard to say, Japan's too much of a Galápagos market
American comics haven't caught on here, and people are too broke
Wolverine is selling like crazy in America because it's friendly and welcoming to Marvel fans and movie fans who normally only play football games
There are people who find it exhausting when a game like FE brags about taking 100 hours to finish
He doesn't consider at all the crowd that finds difficulty, side content, and open worlds a hassle
Wait, huh? Weren't you the one mocking casual players and chanting "core gamers, core gamers" over and over? lol
That's a clear step down from Onimusha, which held #1 for about a week
Beast of Reincarnation, which opened at 41,000 units in its first week, still managed to hit #2 — Wolverine hasn't matched that yet
Onimusha was a title that only sold well in Japan
Wolverine is nearly #2 worldwide — you can't really compare the two
Even Spider-Man 2 missed its target, and this game's estimated sales are already below Spider-Man's, with worse reviews too — there's just no way this one hits its target…
*correction: "minimum sales" should read "estimated sales"
No, both Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine are successes
They'll probably move on to the next one soon — actually, I bet they're already working on it
That's probably also why Ghost of Yōtei's story became a simple, easy-to-follow revenge tale — Ghost of Tsushima's story was apparently too complicated for them
Well, as a result Yōtei's sales ended up cut clean in half, so make of that what you will
There might be users who feel that way
Since it's a character-driven game, people who don't normally play games at all pick it up just because they like the characters
That said, I doubt they'd go so far as to make the difficulty easy because of it
Starting the next one is fine and all, but I bet a mountain of staff will have vanished by then
Layoffs can be good or bad
Like in Japanese manufacturing, the useless old-guard types who do nothing but harass everyone (rōgai, "harmful elders")
those are the ones who should be laid off
Feels like everyone's just taking some random guy's copy-pasted fantasy at face value, as usual
Normally the review rate for games aimed at casual players is about 1%, but it rises right after launch
so 2% is the figure being used. It's just a rough estimate based on past track records, though
・Scores drop when the fake reviews get deleted
■ Nintendo games
・Scores go up when the fake reviews get deleted
Why are these exact opposites, I wonder
Funny how obvious it is who's astroturfing
You say they got deleted, but the review count's actually going up lol lol
Background and Key Points of the Debate
The “unit estimate from a 2% review rate” method used in the thread (nicknamed the “Alinea method”) is an unofficial estimation technique that’s been used on 5ch’s Geha board for a while now, since the PS Store doesn’t publish official sales figures — it’s not a guarantee of actual units sold. The comparison with Death Stranding 2 and the speculation about Insomniac layoffs are likewise just conjecture within the thread; no official announcement has been made on either front. The debate split between those treating this estimate as solid evidence and those questioning the assumptions behind it in the first place, as well as how to interpret the gap between the #1 result in North America and the #6 result in Japan. Regarding the Japanese market, some posts pointed to the tendency for free-to-play titles to dominate the top of the chart and to differing levels of American comic-book culture penetration, but these too are personal opinions, not analysis backed by hard numbers.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry / Geha) thread “Wolverine Surges to #1 on North American PS Store Sales Chart.”
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