Sonohana Sales Stats
March 14th, 2010, by
Posted in Feature
, Tagged: fuguriya, Sono Hanabira ni Kuchidzuke o
We’ve been watching download sales of games from fuguriya’s Sono Hanabira ni Kuchidzuke o series on DLsite ever since the release of the fan translation patch for the first game back on Valentine’s Day. The translator posted a link to where people could buy the game from DLsite in the release post. It appears that the release may have triggered an appreciable amount of sales of the game on DLsite’s English site, although the total amount wasn’t very high, especially compared to sales on the Japanese side.
Let us first look at the sales of the first game on English DLsite compared to the sales of the rest of the series:
As you can see, in the one month after the patch release, download sales of the first game has increased by roughly 40%, while the other games have had pretty much no sales. Keep in mind that the first game has been around on English DLsite since September of 2006.
However, to keep things in perspective, the cumulative sales on English DLsite are actually pretty abysmal compared to sales on the Japanese side of DLsite:
Of course DLsite, is not the only place where this game can be purchased; as of this writing, fuguriya offers games for download through ten different stores, and packaged versions exist as well. By the way, games 3 and 5 (featuring the couple in which one person is tsundere) seem to be doing better than games 2 and 4…
Lastly, let’s take a look at the total amount sales for the series on DLsite in the time period between February 16, 2010 and March 14, 2010:
The large amount of sales for the 8th game on Japanese DLsite is probably due to the fact that the 8th game was only recently released. Outside of the first game, the only other game in the series that actually made a sale on English DLsite was the latest game with a measly 1 sale.
March 14th, 2010 at 10:53 pm
I was one of the buyers. ^_^
March 15th, 2010 at 5:43 am
What would be more interesting now would be to put those stats side-by-side with how many illegal copies of Sonohara were downloaded from the time the English patch was made available. Of course such data would quite simply be, impossible to obtain, but I’d estimate it to be upto 10 times or even 100 times higher than the number of sales DLSite got.
March 15th, 2010 at 6:31 am
Aaeru: Simple way to get results would be to just compare amount of times the patch was downloaded to the sales. Sure, there’s other places you can buy the game from as well, but quite few people also illegally downloaded the game before patch’s release so it should somewhat even out.
March 15th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Aaeru: And what exactly would that tell you?
March 15th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
KaioShin: a ratio of visual novel players who are willing to spend money vs those who are not. And therefore whether there is room for expansion in this business.
March 16th, 2010 at 12:55 am
Aaeru: How do you plan on expanding the business to serve people who are not willing to spend money? Ad-supported games? Or do you mean people who may be willing to spend money provided it’s cheap? But then how do you pick these people out of the entire pool of people who downloaded the game but did not pay for it?
March 16th, 2010 at 2:22 am
I think he means he’d like to figure out if expanding is even possible at all. If the game’d turn out to actually have been very popular, yet still noone bought it, there would not be much prospect for new companies to try their hand at this.
March 16th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
This resembles a point I brought up regarding a game my partners and I translated back in July.
Patch Downloads (MediaFire)*: 708
Japanese DLsite Purchases: 117
English DLsite Purchases: 30
* This value is from the MediaFire mirror of our patch and does not include the number of times our main HTTP mirror was downloaded. It could be much higher.
The game in question, Rosenkreuzstilette, costs 1260 yen (~$13.50 US) and has a considerable cult following on YouTube / in hardcore gaming circles. Despite that, the game was purchased only thirty times in eight months. Sono Hanabira garnered more than double the sales (73 as of this writing) in an eighth of the time despite costing more (1785 yen) and having a much lower playtime. Does this mean perverts have more integrity than gamers?
(No, I’m not disparaging the game or its audience in the slightest; I’ve played through it myself and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m just trying to understand why two titles with similar release models have received such different treatment…)
Since you brought it up: where can I buy a retail copy of the original Sono Hanabira ni Kuchizuke wo? Call me materialistic if you like, but I’m rather fond of having official pressings of a game (as opposed to do-it-yourself backups of DDL titles).
March 16th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
The number of people who actually bought it are the only ones you can calculate with, everything more is just guesswork. It doesn’t make much practical sense to equal 1000 pirate downloads with 1000 or even a single possible purchase. Seeing how many people pirated a game will only frustrate, there is nothing to be gained from such a statistic.
The people who are buying the games count. Either there are enough or there aren’t. Simple as that. If enough people are buying then it doesn’t matter if there are 5 or 5 million others who are pirating it too. Just don’t try to make up imaginary numbers about “potential” or “ruined business” where there in all likelyhood never was any, pirates or not.
March 16th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
TDOMMX: Unfortunately, according to the official website, the physical game is no longer in print. You might still be able to track a few copies down at used games stores in Japan, though. Yahoo Auction or anime conventions might also work. By the way, I believe there were around 50 sales of the game on English DLsite before the patch release, so it’s not like DLsite moved 73 copies in a month. Nice to see other stats, though.
August 5th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
[...] Luego, el aislarse con el fin de evitar presión mediática y política que aumente la censura y afecte a la industria es esencialmente algo futil a largo plazo. Y, además, se pierden, aunque sea de manera leve, las potenciales ventas que se producen cuando se produce un parche. No es un gran aumento, pero ocurre (Si las figuras de la venta de Sono Hanabira ni Kuchizuke wo sirven de referencia). [...]