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The story
An aggregated image circulating online claims that sales of Marvel’s Wolverine for PS5 have fallen 75% in Japan and 60% in Europe compared to its predecessor, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, sparking discussion on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (Geha) board. The previous title reportedly sold around 2.5 million units worldwide in its launch window, so a simple extrapolation suggests Wolverine’s worldwide sales could be stuck in the hundreds of thousands. Posters in the thread were divided over the terms of Sony’s contract with Marvel, the outlook for recouping development costs, and whether the comparison is even valid given how much the ratio of digital sales has shifted since the last game.
■ Japan: -75%
PS5 Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
77,348 units
Source: i.imgur.com / Original post here
What people said
If this one's down 60-75%, Wolverine's worldwide sales are probably sitting around 600k-900k.
No wonder they can't announce the numbers 😭
That's a total flop.
Well, Japan was already dead to begin with…
But Spidey 2 sold well in Europe! As long as Europe's buying, there's still hope! 🥰
Oh wait, Europe's dead too 😄
Post your source properly.
– Marathon
– Saros
– Marvel Tōkon (Fighting Souls)
– Wolverine
Not a single one of those makes me want to play it.
Meanwhile:
Re: #26
I actually thought Marvel Tōkon was gonna sell like crazy…
There's no way this hits 6 million.
Guess they'll just dump it into PS Plus for free to pad the numbers.
They're probably not making a sequel anyway, so no real damage.
Worst case, they just give it away for free and count that as 'sold.'
That's the whole trick behind 'Other-land.'
It only goes up once they dump it into PS Plus.
Surely they won't pull a Saros and just leave it out of the earnings report entirely — guess we wait for the financials.
Like that trash Gran Turismo, where 'if you never release the numbers, it never officially flopped' — there's a real chance they just say nothing at all in the earnings report.
I honestly doubt the same studio even made Wolverine.
Even if it's the same studio, unlike Japanese companies their staff turnover is really high, so the quality ends up all over the place.
Keeping the combat — which wasn't that fun to start with — basically unchanged and then making it the whole focus for Wolverine was obviously a bad call, fair point.
Honestly, swinging around was about the only fun part of Spidey.
And in Wolverine, even that stopped being fun.
Europe's number includes digital…
So there are a ton of victims who bought this garbage at full price digitally, where they can't even resell it?
The whole idea was that making Spider-Man-style games over and over would get stale and boring, so they poured huge money into Wolverine to build a second pillar.
But if that flops and there's no longer any prospect of recouping development costs on future exclusive Marvel games, isn't Sony the one who'd actually want to drop the license?
Same Marvel IP, same publisher Sony, same developer — this argument comes up every time.
The shift to digital has moved on a lot since back then, so you can't assume the same ratio.
It's been 2 years, so PS5 Pro adoption has gone up too.
↓
Can't buy discs for it
↓
So the digital ratio goes up too.
Stop rewriting history to suit your argument.
It's actually dropped back down into the 80s now…
Yeah, finding a match is basically hopeless at that point…
Background and Points of Debate
It’s worth noting that the figures in this thread come from an aggregated image posted on social media, not an official number released by Sony. In Japan’s retail sales surveys, the share of digital downloads has been climbing year after year, so comparing straight against the previous title’s launch may make the physical-only decline look larger than the real drop actually is. This very point was a source of disagreement in the thread over whether the comparison is even valid. There was also talk that Marvel could terminate its deal with Sony if sales fall short of 6 million units, but the contract itself has never been made public, so readers should treat that detail as unconfirmed.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Sad News] Wolverine Sales Down 75% in Japan, 60% in Europe vs. Predecessor, Total Flop 😭.”
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