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The story
Nihon Falcom has announced that cumulative sales of its “Trails” series have surpassed 10 million units. That’s up from the 9 million mark reported a year earlier, and the growth over that period is widely attributed to the series’ expansion onto Switch and Steam. On 5ch’s hardware/industry (console wars) board, some welcomed this apparent break from the series’ longtime PlayStation-only focus, while others took a cooler view, calling 10 million “nothing special.” The thread also branched into whether newcomers can realistically jump into the series, and if so, where they should start.
Source
Source: news1.kr / Original article here
What people said
It's not really 'ditching' though, lol
https://gamebiz.jp/news/413049
They didn't flee though, lol
About 20 of those were bought by me.
Isn't Capcom more of a PC thing?
You lose interest once you're an adult.
My bad, it's tomorrow
Well, I think they will. They'll probably keep doing remakes in this format through Zero and Azure too, right? Those were originally 2D games after all.
No, they said something like that in an interview right after launch — 'The Steam version got unexpectedly great reception, PS5 sold as usual, and the Switch version fell short of expectations.'
Show an actual source for that
Wasn't that about the manufacturing division (domestic packaged sales) not growing, where they said Switch came in below projections? To begin with, PS5 just not selling was 'as expected' — nothing positive was ever said about it.
That's how things have been shifting lately.
The Switch crowd tends to buy in gradually over time.
PS is more like: strong at launch, then…
The PS Store is strong for free-to-play titles and new releases, but older games barely move even on sale. No matter how cheap it gets, people who already bought it obviously won't buy again — meaning there just aren't new buyers.
That's a cumulative total across 14 titles including remakes, right?
It's 16 titles over 22 years:
Sky 1-3 (Trails in the Sky FC/SC/the 3rd)
Zero and Azure (Trails from Zero / to Azure)
Nayuta
Cold Steel 1-4
Reverie
Daybreak 1-2
Beyond the Horizon
Sky remakes 1-2
I'm interested in Cold Steel, but the whole "you have to play the earlier series first" prerequisite is such a hassle that it makes me not want to touch the Trails series at all.
You play Sky 1-3, then Trails from Zero, then clear Trails to Azure — only after that do you finally get to Cold Steel.
And tons of characters from the older games show up too: Rector in Cold Steel, for instance, actually first appeared in Sky the 3rd as a former student at Jenis Royal Academy.
I started from Cold Steel III and it played just fine, honestly.
I'd say the core of the Trails fanbase is actually people in their 40s-60s. If new entries keep stalling like this while they just churn out remakes, before long you'll get people saying "I didn't live to see the ending" lol
https://cimg.kgl-systems.io/camion/files/dengeki/73917/a754c7fbb4a009a29a3a89bdfb139944a.jpg
No matter how much it turned into a 'barrier station' (paywall-style gate) from part 3 onward, that just shows a lot of users said 'no thanks' to paying for the barrier just to keep playing Trails.
There's no such thing as "Daybreak III"
I can't be expected to know character names and lore from games I haven't played.
Re: #78
Really? Maybe you're just overly wary of anything serialized.
It's not like you can't enjoy Romance of the Three Kingdoms unless you start from the Yellow Turban Rebellion.
Trails changes protagonists between arcs, though
Do you seriously think every reader starts from chapter one?
So kind of like JoJo?
Yeah, pretty much like that.
Like with Hana no Keiji (a samurai manga/drama) too — you don't need to know the Sengoku era from the very start either.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The “10 million units” figure comes from Nihon Falcom’s own announcement of cumulative shipments and downloads, while the 9 million figure was from the previous year’s commemorative dividend tied to “Trails in the Sky the 1st.” The one-million-unit increase over that year is attributed not just to the PlayStation platforms the series has long relied on, but to its expanded rollout on Switch (2) and Steam. Where the thread split was over how to judge this apparent “PlayStation exodus”: some posters shared anecdotes that the games chart well during Steam sales but show little movement on the PlayStation Store. That said, the quote attributed to Falcom’s president and the age-demographic graph that got posted both lacked any clear sourcing — they weren’t official material, just posters’ memory or screenshots, so they should be taken with a grain of salt. Another point of debate was whether newcomers could jump in starting from something like “Trails of Cold Steel,” given how the series carries forward lore from earlier entries; posters compared it to long-running manga or historical dramas in arguing over whether it’s possible to “read partway through.” This isn’t really a question with a right answer — it’s best understood as simply a matter of personal taste that varies a lot from person to person.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Console Wars)) thread “[Nihon Falcom] Trails series tops 10 million units. Up 1 million in one year“.
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