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The story
The action RPG “Stupid Never Dies,” released as a PS5 exclusive, failed to even crack the top 30 in the weekly software sales rankings. It’s developed by GPTRACK50, a new studio founded by Hiroyuki Kobayashi, known for his work on the Devil May Cry and Dragon’s Dogma series. Despite being featured on a State of Play and getting a playable demo released, the game flopped hard, and 5ch’s hardware/industry board erupted with questions about the marketing approach and genre labeling — comments like “the demo itself was negative publicity” and “why call it an RPG when it has no RPG elements at all” poured in. Steam’s concurrent player count also struggled to grow, with many pointing out how hard it will be to recoup development costs.
It got featured on State of Play Japan and even had a demo released… so why did it still flop?
Source: youtu.be / Original article here
What people said
Doesn't look like they'll recoup even 1/100th of the development costs.
if they'd done it before Kemuri, this game would've gotten way more attention.
Vanquish was a success though
Exclusive interview with GPTRACK50's Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Kobayashi, who worked on Sengoku Basara and Dragon's Dogma, opens up about what he poured into his new company. The new title in development is a 3D action RPG!
https://www.famitsu.com/news/202310/05317373.html
Oh, it's under NetEase…
That's seriously the kind of thing that gets a studio shut down
Signature move: 'Hype It Up, But Never Buy It!!!'
Can't even crack the rankings — the title 'King of Third-Party Bombers' is no joke
Not even cracking the top 30 means it sold
1,201 copies or fewer —
a true, ultra-catastrophic nuclear bomb of a flop.
Kinda like 'Ultimate Heavenly Wolf Fang Blade' lol (a melodramatic finishing-move name meme)
but there's no RPG elements at all.
Why even lie about that?
Nintendo Direct is right there as a model, so why do they keep botching it like this?
Just copying the format outright would be better,
but instead they show off videos all tangled up in corporate pride and internal/external video-production politics.
Seriously, such an uncool company.
but as it stands, it's done.
Guess it didn't stretch as far as natto did (i.e., sales didn't grow either).
A calamity so bad even Ganon would turn tail and run
Even a talented game creator out of Capcom
only pulls 3-digit sales when it's up against the PS5
though I've only seen the videos
and it ends up like this lol
The shovelware rate is so high that you can't afford to buy unless it's a genuinely great game
And who even owns a PS5 anyway?
but producers pretty much all flop across the board.
Okamoto just happened to hit it big with Monster Strike and became a billionaire — without that, he'd have been finished too.
nobody's watching, so people probably don't even know this game exists.
The Resonance demo was also announced on State of Play, but since no thread got made for it, nobody knew about that one either.
It's not that the creators who left Capcom
are so amazing —
it's the engineers who stayed at Capcom who are amazing.
Back in the PS3 era,
Famitsu and Sony kept hyping them up as 'genius creators,'
and a bunch of idiots bought into their own hype.
Ongi, Nomu, Koitsu, Meru (forum nicknames for various ex-Capcom creators) —
they all scattered and faded away.
The only real genius in the world was Kojima.
Turns out 'Beardy' (nickname for a bearded ex-Square Enix developer), who kept making reasonably well-received games after leaving, was actually doing just fine by comparison.
That's because of the falling-out with Koei Tecmo, so there was nothing he could do about it on his own
Steam's worldwide peak concurrent players: 399
https://steamdb.info/app/3486530/charts/
That number's even worse than Marvel Toukon (a widely mocked flop title)
https://krsw.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/ghard/1793335633/
Guess it's something you just casually hop into, like the old 'Corolla II' line (a now-dated ad catchphrase: 'nobody who drives a Corolla II is a bad person')
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
There’s long been persistent criticism in the games industry that State of Play carries much weaker promotional impact than a Nintendo Direct, and this discussion played out in that same context. GPTRACK50 is the studio Hiroyuki Kobayashi — known for Devil May Cry and Dragon’s Dogma — founded after leaving Capcom, and the fact that it falls under NetEase became a talking point in the thread as a closure risk; it’s worth noting, though, that this is purely speculation and not an official announcement. It’s also worth noting that the marketing pitch of “made by the team behind a famous series” has rarely translated into strong sales in the past, and the reaction here bears that pattern out once again. The thread’s discussion centered mainly on doubts about the genre labeling and criticism of the promotional approach, so it’s probably more accurate to read it as commentary on industry structure than as a verdict on any individual developer’s talent.
*This article was compiled by excerpting and summarizing the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “PS5-Exclusive Stupid Never Dies Fails to Crack Top 30.”
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