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The story
Marvel’s new action game Wolverine has reportedly sold 1.9 million copies worldwide and earned $130 million in revenue in just three days, according to an overseas analytics firm — surpassing the lifetime total of director Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2 (1.8 million copies, $129 million), which has been out for over a year. However, Wolverine’s Metacritic scores — 77 critic / 6.4 user — fall well short of Death Stranding 2’s 89 critic / 8.7 user scores. On 5ch’s game-hardware (Geha) board, opinions were split over whether it’s even valid to compare a ‘3-day’ figure against DS2’s lifetime total, and whether 1.9 million copies can really be called a success against a development budget of $305 million (roughly ¥47.3 billion).
What people said
Head of market analysis Reece Elliott explains in Alinea Analytics' latest Substack newsletter that the PS5-exclusive Wolverine rapidly racked up $130 million in revenue, while Death Stranding 2's total PS5 sales sit slightly behind at $129 million — despite having been out for more than a year. Likewise, Wolverine has already scored a hit with 1.9 million copies sold on PS5, while Death Stranding 2 lags behind with 1.8 million total.
These numbers help explain PlayStation's decision to abandon Hideo Kojima's new stealth game Physint, pleasing its new publisher, Xbox. The underwhelming Wolverine holds a Metacritic score of 77, with an even harsher 6.4 user rating across more than 3,500 reviews, while Death Stranding 2 boasts a genuinely strong 89 on Metacritic and an 8.7 user score. But does anyone really look for critical merit in a PS5 game? Making easy money is so much better than that.
Is this supposed to be the punchline?
Everyone around is saying it's not good, but they're ignoring that and just treating it as '2 million sold.'
It hasn't even outsold Spider-Man — I think that's a really shaky narrative.
Did they just read the script Sony handed them word-for-word? lol
Spider-Man 1: 3.3M (3 days) (highly rated)
Spider-Man 2: 2.5M (1 day) (highly rated)
Wolverine: 1.9M (3 days) (terribly rated)
Didn't Spider-Man 2 also fall short of its sales target even with those numbers, and end up giving away a ton of copies?
If anything, it's precisely because it had a decent launch that the terrible content is now blowing up into this big pile-on.
Well, the Marvel quota can technically be hit even in the worst case by just giving copies away for free —
though doing that makes clearing the already-tough profit line even harder.
That's because they were being developed around the same time.
If they could've cancelled Wolverine, they'd have cancelled Death Stranding 2 too.
Both had gone too far and spent too much money, so it was probably a case of 'better to ship and recoup something than scrap it outright.'
Under the Marvel deal, Sony was also supposed to make two more X-Men games (each expected to sell 6+ million) besides Wolverine. So maybe they're worried about funding those, or worried that if Wolverine flops the exclusivity payment goes to waste and the remaining two X-Men games risk cancellation — and cutting the money-guzzling Kojima was a way to cover those potential losses.
Is this thing actually going to get there?
No way, obviously.
A 'comes bundled free with something' campaign is going to start soon.
Sony Pictures and SIE are separate companies, you know.
Totoki (Sony's president) isn't going to let that slide.
It's got the same vibe as [REDACTED], which cashed in and bailed, trading on nothing but its name value and trust from past titles.
This time the bad reputation has already spread, so it might not keep climbing in numbers the way Wilds (Monster Hunter Wilds) did.
Even Wilds still sold 10 million.
Well, there is a segment of people who just tune out any bad news, so I guess that's fair…
They can't release the numbers officially because it's a confirmed massive flop,
but having their yes-men write puff-piece articles is the usual playbook.
and yet they're calling 1.9 million a 'huge hit' for a $305 million AAA title.
This is Shitty Sony's specialty: a fabricated puff piece, lol.
Missed the 'dollars.'
'Fartverine's' (a mocking pun on Wolverine's Japanese name) production budget is $305 million —
about ¥47.3 billion, lol.
Sounds like the new one is going to load up on celebrities again too — no wonder Sony's cutting them loose.
On top of development costs, they've got that office and around 250 staff, five years of development since Death Stranding 1 —
if anything, that might cost more than Wolverine.
And yet Kojima Productions is doing just fine even with only 2 million sold, meaning they must be getting a solid chunk of money from Sony. On top of that, if they're saying they don't want exclusivity and want to keep the IP rights for themselves, well, of course they'd get cut loose.
It's not just development costs — it's also become way too much of a vanity business, with weird advertising, 'creators' (lol), 'performance' (lol), and 'superiority' (lol) piled on top.
It doesn't look like they're making and selling games anymore — it looks like they're just spending huge money trying to manipulate the masses.
They spend tens of billions hoping for a jackpot worth hundreds of billions.
Well, 1.9 million in worldwide sales leans toward 'flop' territory anyway…
especially since these guys spent way too much money.
Even the 'barrier' crowd (PS fanboys) who were fabricating claims of '2 million on day one' got called out on this —
when you factor in the development costs, it's nowhere near enough.
Even people overseas are saying this while ignoring the inconvenient Marvel quota line and the break-even line, so it's probably genuinely bad…
Actually, going by the footage circulating online right now, I'm not even sure that money can honestly be called 'development cost' in the first place.
Re: #113
Your 'satisfaction' is leaking out.
The claim boils down to: 'It sold more than titles that didn't sell'
and 'it sold less than titles that did sell' —
that's literally the argument being made here…
Because 'world-famous Kojima' joined the Xbox family —
it's meant to plant a negative image.
Background and points of contention
Marvel’s Wolverine is a PS5-exclusive big-budget project reportedly costing $305 million (roughly ¥47.3 billion) to develop. The overseas analysis behind this article (Alinea Analytics) compared Wolverine’s 3-day sales figures and revenue against the lifetime total of Death Stranding 2, which has been out for over a year, and claimed Wolverine came out ahead. The thread split mainly over two points. One was the validity of the comparison itself: Death Stranding 2 is widely seen as a title that fell short of its own targets and was cited as a factor behind Sony and Kojima Productions reassessing their relationship, so many questioned framing ‘outselling an underperforming title’ as an achievement. The other was the gap between raw unit sales and the actual break-even line — 1.9 million is a modest figure for a worldwide AAA release, and recouping a $305-million-plus budget would require getting close to the roughly 6-million-unit quota reportedly set by Marvel, which this falls well short of. Wolverine’s low Metacritic critic score (77) and user score (6.4), compared with Death Stranding 2’s 89/8.7, was also raised as evidence of a gap between hype and actual reception. The lack of any official sales announcement from Sony fed into the view in the thread that this was a ‘puff piece cherry-picking convenient numbers.’
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, ‘Geha’) thread “Wolverine, despite everyone mocking it, becomes a huge hit — already surpassing Death Stranding 2 in just 3 days”.
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