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The story
New copies of the PS5 action game Marvel’s Wolverine are being sold at GEO for 39% off list price, less than a month after release — and it’s become a hot topic on 5ch. Thread posters pointed to the game’s first-week sales in Japan of roughly 20,000 units, a 75% drop from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s 77,348, along with a Metascore of 75 and a 60% sales decline in Europe, sparking debate over the reasons behind both the rapid price drop and the weak sales. Discussion also touched on the game’s large development budget and the sales structure in which PS5 titles that don’t sell through in their opening week tend to see prices collapse quickly.
What people said
Online
List price info
Instead of word-of-mouth driving a slow climb in sales, even the new-copy price is just grinding straight down ;;
First-week sales
■Japan: -75%
PS5 Marvel's Spider-Man 2
77,348 units
↓
PS5 Marvel's Wolverine
20,000 units
■Europe: -60%
https://i.imgur.com/IpYZcja.jpe
"Wolverine's just worse than Spider-Man" would actually be a fine excuse — if they hadn't blown $300 million making it
That's genuinely shocking
the publisher (wink wink) is doing just fine
Hint: they're "like-new" used copies (shinkohin — opened return stock resold as near-new)
YouTube's good enough for this one
Not much further to the bargain bin now
decades ago the movies gave him decent name recognition
but these days he's probably just remembered as "the guy from the Deadpool movie"
This is retailer-killing at its finest
Something game-shaped like this tops out at about 980 yen
It's got that indie look, doesn't seem like money was spent anywhere in it
Don't you dare try selling an indie-tier game at full price
Go spend like $100 million making it first!
It's unbearable to look at no matter where you check
Clearing out that stock is going to be rough
I'd think retailers would actually welcome that — no more being stuck selling dead stock at a loss
Because for PS titles, if it doesn't sell in week one, it's basically over
From the supplier's side, they want to kill off this early collapse in street price
Once there's no competition left and it's download-only, prices get a lot easier to control than now
You can sympathize with devs getting jerked around by the suits above, but it's hard to argue when people say this company is done
So on-brand for you to sneak in some promo for "Trash Musha" (ゴミ武者 — a mocking nickname posters use for another game) while you're at it lol
Once discs are gone, digital sale discounts will probably get stingier than they are now
For PS software, there'll be no more competition — the PS Store price becomes the only price that exists
Say, for example, Wolverine had instead launched sometime after 2028:
then the only prices in existence would be the ¥8,980 list price and whatever sale price the publisher decides on
Whether users would accept that price, who knows
Is this a speed record for a price crash?
What about Beast-whatshisname?
How is it that SIE — the very company pushing "this is just the trend" — can't even manage it properly?
If they actually understood the market they'd be holding back shipments
https://store.playstation.com/ja-jp/category/d0446d4b-dc9a-4f1e-86ec-651f099c9b29/5?sortBy=sales30&sortOrder=desc
Selling well as a download?
Really?
It only shows up on page 5
Same old answer as always: the standard for judging a game as a product has zero awareness of the "is it actually fun" category
Both the buyback price and the sale price need to drop more before the stock clears out
Huh, is that so
Dragon's Dogma 2 sitting at 1,500 yen during its launch week really is something else
Background and key points of this discussion
Physical game price crashes aren’t unusual on their own, but what stands out here is that a brand-new copy dropped nearly 40% in under a month from launch. The thread pointed to a difference in sales culture behind this: PS5 titles that don’t sell through in their first week tend to get dumped quickly by retailers trying to offload dead stock, whereas Nintendo titles tend to hold their list price much longer. There’s also a gap between the Metascore of 75 and hopes that word-of-mouth would drive steady sales growth, and the scale of the development budget (posters cited figures around $300 million) is shaping how people are reacting to the price collapse. Opinions also split on the merits of physical releases altogether — some argue going download-only would reduce retailers’ dead-stock risk, while others note it would make it harder for a real market price to form through sales, so behind this one price-drop story lies a broader disagreement over the distribution system itself.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry (Geha)) thread “[Sad News] Panned Game “Wolverine” Gets Dumped Brand-New at GEO for 39% Off List Price lololol“.
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