IGA's games were fun for a while, but the dude had to go. He's a gent, but someone who saw no problem with Cthulhu floating around in a residential quarter with chandeliers twice as big as The Old One had to go.
The series needed a change from IGA's formula, but it didn't need a drastic overhaul like Cox thinks. Some of Konami's best-selling franchises haven't changed much at all over the years, even though they've declined in popularity. Declining sales naturally encouraged Konami to try something different and SOTN took off because of that gamble, but then gamers quickly bored of IGAvanias. That's not opinion, that's economics. Even with very limited figures, Castlevania's history wasn't impressive even under IGA and still not impressive under Cox. Some of the most impressive figures were in the NES days. CV3 took a hit and the series changed after that but only SOTN and LOI made a dent in the figures. These numbers are off of VGChartz.com and some of the data is missing too. (SOTN sold only 210,000 copies in Japan, and all in the first year? I find that hard to believe.) The three NES games, according to the site, were hits in Japan and USA, but abyssmal flops in Europe. Whether this is true or just shows a lack of sales figures available from Europe, I can't say.
SOTN: 1.27 million units sold globally on the PS
CV1: 1.23 million units on the NES
LOI: 0.94 million units
CV2: 0.93 million units
COTM: 0.89 million units
CV3: 0.85 million units
LoS: 0.79 million units on the PS3
LoS: 0.51 million units on the XBox360 (for a total of 1.30 million in 3 years, not bad)
CV64: 0.64 million units
CoD: 0.42 million units
DoS: 0.37 million units
DXC: 0.37 million units
PoR: 0.35 million units
OoE: 0.31 million units
AoS: 0.28 million units without sales figures from Japan
A lot of the figures on that site are lacking data from various years. OoE, for example, only has the first two years of sales in Japan, but the US has sales numbers for every year since OoE's release. I can't help but wonder where Cox gets his figures and just how accurate they are. But let's just look at LoS's figures since they're likely to be the most accurate and revised (by the way, you'll notice MoF didn't even surpass AoS).
2010 400,574 N/A 400,574
2011 263,611 -34.2% 664,185
2012 101,745 -61.4% 765,930
2013 20,844 -79.5% 786,774
Those are actually decent declining figures. A steady drop is acceptable and a 400k opening weekend just for the PS2 is impressive. But wow, 2013 took a huge hit in the sales. In the first two years, everyone wanted to play it upon release. Sales were steady in the first three months upon release (October 2010) and sales were already at 300k before the year was even over. There's no denying that's impressive for a Castlevania game. In nearly every country, sales were high in the first two months. The US and Europe (on average) maintained 10k+ units per week for the first 5 weeks. Sales numbers for Japan on that sight show sales crippled by the third week. Are figures missing from Japan? Can't say. Are figures missing from other parts of Europe? Of course, as Spain isn't listed but probably sold a majority of the European sales, if Steampunk was representative of Spain at all. So there's no denying, on any one platform LoS is doing better than any of the recent Castlevania games, but overall it's on par with SOTN, since Saturn Sales aren't documented properly. Considering it's well above 1k sales this year, it's no doubt a success in Konami's eyes, but reports for MoF aren't even over 100k yet, so in the portable area MS has fizzled.
To put some things in perspective though:
- Asteroids on the Atari 2600 sold over 3 million units
- E.T. on the Atari 2600 sold (yes, sold) over 1.5 million units
- Demon Attack on the Atari 2600 sold over 2 million units
- Missile Command on the Atari 2600 sold over 2.5 million units
- Pitfall on the Atari 2600 alone sold over 4 million units
- Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 sold over 7 million units (and was shit)
- Pac-Man collection on the GBA sold 2.9 million units
- Six Pac-Man games have recorded sales of 1 million units or more.
- Pac-Man has sold over 43 million units in its franchise history
- The Sims franchise has sold over 150 million units
- The Sims 3 has sold over 10 million units across platforms
- Tetris has sold over 125 million units in franchise history
- Tetris DS sold over 2 million units
- Tetris Axis on the 3DS sold 0.31 million units (still better than MoF)
- Need For Speed has sold over 100 million units in franchise history
- Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit sold over 4.5 million units total
- Need For Speed: The Run sold 3 million units total
- Madden NFL 10 outsold most Castlevania games just in its first week
- Gran Turismo 4 outsold most Castlevania games just in its first week in Japan alone
- Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 sold 10.4 million units
- Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior) has sold over 61 million units in franchise history
- Bejeweled has sold 50 million copies (and it's just a clone of Same Game, wtf!)
- Tekken 6 sold over 3.7 million units between the PS3 and XBox3600 versions
- Mega Man Zero Collection for the DS sold 0.24 million units (still better than MoF)
- Mortal Kombat on the PS3 sold 2.2 million units
- Metroid has 8 titles that sold over 1 million units
- Metroid: Zero Mission sold 0.84 million units (essentially a remake of Metroid)
- Devil May Cry has sold over 11 million units spanning 4 titles
- Sim City has sold over 18 million units in franchise history
KONAMI'S LIST OF ACHIEVEMENTS- Castlevania has sold over 20 million units in franchise history
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES sold 4.2 million units
- TMNT II:The Arcade on the NES sold 2.2 million units
- TMNT III: The Manhattan Project on the NES sold 1.4 million units
- TMNT on the GBA and PS2 both sold over 0.92 million units
- Gradius on the NES sold over 1.3 million units
- Konami's soccer games consistently sell over 2 million units
- Dance Dance Revolution typically sell 2 million units
- Yu-Gi-Oh video games typically sell over 2 million units
We can see a few things from this: Atari games sold better than most Castlevania games. Games franchises that have not changed much at all still outsell Castlevania. Sports and racing games are almost guaranteed sellers. Even Tetris outsells Castlevania. Most importantly and as everyone already knows, MoF was a flop. To be honest, I'm actually a bit surprised it flopped, but more on that in a sec.
While LoS so far has been Castlevania's greatest success, superseding SOTN by a smidgen, it's hardly a success story, let alone something Cox should be patting himself on the back for. Releasing a game of such magnitude in this era of bloated game developer staffs is praiseworthy, but in terms of sales figures it's not that impressive. We will have to wait until LoS2 to see if Cox actually did well. If LoS2 is a flop, Castlevania very well could be dead in Konami's eyes. The franchise has always been one of Konami's low sellers.
The history of the franchise has shown that the initial release of a director or system yields decent sales, but subsequent games yield shameful numbers. Castlevania was the best seller on the NES. Ironically, for all the love SCV4 gets these days, in terms of sales it was a bomb. Even CV64 beat it out. Why CV64 bombed so bad baffles me. Yes, the game sucked in many people's eyes, but it was the flagship of 3Dvanias; it should have actually fared better. LoI tried to bring the series back up and in a way it succeeded -- it could be argued that LoS would have been a total failure if LoI hadn't shown fans that Castlevania could be rendered in 3D. MoF was the series' 3DS flagship, but not Cox's. I almost wonder if MoF had come out before LoS if it would have had better opening sales. Would LoS have sold as well to this point if MoF had come out first?
Of course all of this could be wrong -- much of the info comes from vgchartz.com. A lot of information is lacking. How many units of Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge sold? According to vgchartz.com, less than 10,000. I find that hard to believe. Obviously information is missing. And therein lies the problem with Cox's comments. He says his game is the best selling game in CV history, but how do we know? We assume he has insider knowledge from Konami, but it's just as plausible he's scouring the net for information like the rest of us. He sees the sales figures, tallies them up, sees that LoS sold more across two platforms than SotN did on one platform. LoS as far as VGChartz knows only barely beat out SotN in sales but there is no record of the Saturn version's sales. Only one or two versions of CV1's sales are even available from VGchartz and yet those versions alone are nearly the same in sales as LoS. From what I can tell at VGChartz, games from the SNES era often didn't have numbers reported for more than 2 years, whereas PS2, PS3, and XBox games have numbers reported for 3 or 4 years. Many Gameboy titles are lacking numbers and Wii VC sales aren't accurately reported as well. Just because he's an exec at Konami doesn't mean he has any significant insider knowledge. Also missing (and understandably so) are pirate figures; how many copies of Castlevania games have been pirated and downloaded illegally and are still present in the offenders' households?
It is entirely plausible LoS was just a flagship production destined to lead to horrible sales figures in subsequent releases as has it seems was the case throughout Konami's history according to vgchartz. While I don't think Cox is just pulling numbers out of his ass, I think he's ignoring what they mean. He's also further exemplifying his immaturity by boasting about his sales figures WITHIN THE FRANCHISE. So he may have sold more copies of LoS than any other CV game in Konami history, the sales revenue is still unimpressive in the history of video games. Cox sounds like a guy boasting about bowling 120 while his friends average 70 to 100, but the group of bowlers three lanes over are averaging 190 to 250.
I fell asleep while typing this. So now as for the release-date games: I like the staff size argument. Also is the fact I think that most developers of systems aren't waiting for a game library. They wasted enough time developing the systems, they want to capitalize on the new technology as soon as possible and release the system with or without a game library. Nintendo in the old days made sure it had a good games library. When they got jumpy, they released the Virtual Boy ahead of schedule with a horrible library of games. The system was a flop. It wasn't a bad system, it was marketed poorly. One of the reasons Mario is such an iconic gaming figure is because he continues to help Nintendo provide a fun flagship game for each system upon release. Developers can see how Nintendo incorporated Mario into the new system and then they can get on board to make games too. Also, I think maybe the programming languages for new systems might be a bit different and developers aren't being provided adequate development software. And then you have cases like Sega where the hardware developer told programmers to go fuck themselves if they didn't like something.