For the first time in years, Monster Rancher has made it into the
top 10 Japanese sales charts!

According to the Japanese chart for the week ending on July 15th,
Monster Farm DS managed to nab 10th place with total sales of
22,224 units in three days.

Congratulations, Tecmo and Cing!

This is awesome news!!!

Let's hope the sales continue so it will guarantee a U.S. release and future releases of more MR games, as well!

Lets hope that people keep buying it at a fairly brisk pace. It would be nice to have a handheld game break 50,000 in sales.

ya it would, keep the MR series alive !

Unfortunately, MFDS could not hold its position for very long. This week it dropped from 10th to 31st with total sales of 7,809 units. That might seem a bit strange, but it's normal. It may involve the number of copies shipped, though.

In any case, it's now sold 30,136 units in Japan. It's still on track to net profit for at least Tecmo (publishers have priority in the case of an external studio developing a publisher-concept game). Let's look at some fairly theoretical numbers, shall we?

Let's assume that the budget was the average for a DS game, $350,000 eqivalent, and the game is being sold at $34.99. Let's also assume the retail markup is about 20%, and the total cost for licensing fees to Nintendo and shipping and such are around $11 (perhaps a bit high for this example). If 50% of that is agreed upon to cover all the remaining costs, then the net profit for each game sold should be about $8.49.

In this case, 8.49 x 30,136 = 255,854.64. That's $94,145.36 away from breaking even. About 11,364 more units should be enough to break even, but the developer might lose a bit of cash.

If the game ends up selling 50,000 units, then the total profit will be 424,500 - 350,000 = 74,500. That's the sweet spot.

any idea how many people work on a game like this and how long? just curious

oh and excellent calculations :P

Eh, the real thing is far more complex than that. The profit per unit could be significantly more or less in the end. With PS2, retailers got 10%, and Nintendo tends to cut special deals with developers and publishers often.

I'm not sure how many of Cing's people were involved in development, but it has about 29 employees total. This game likely didn't take very long to develop, though, since many of the resources were readily available and provided by Tecmo.

I wish I read Japanese, I really like to know what is going on more in games. I WANT a copy, but my boyfriend says I have to learn Japanese first, "since you always read EVERYTHING" (he is a text skipper) I wish I could help with the sales on this one, but it looks like it'll be a while before I win this battle. Maybe once you wonderful people have figured most of it out...*sigh*

You can play the game just fine if you're familiar with MR1, 2 and the GBA games. The only problem is that you won't be able to tell exactly what anyone's saying.

Monster Farm DS' sales are starting to stabilize now. It sold 5,094 units on the week ending July 29th, bringing the total to 34,719 units sold. It's getting there.

You'll notice the numbers of units seem to be a bit off. This is because some sales spill into the following week and still end up counted towards the former. Likewise, some sales tend to be missed towards the end of Sunday. In this case, MFDS actually sold 7,298 units during its second week, bringing the total to 29,625. And during the first three days of release on the week ending July 15th, it sold a higher 22,327 units.

However, due to a huge surge of new titles released this past week on all five major consoles, there were at least 13 new additions to the top 50, ten of them making the top twenty. Thus Monster Farm DS was pushed down to 53rd in the top 100. It took the impact quite well considering.

At this rate, the game should hit around 40,000 units by the end of the month.

Well, it's been over a month since Monster Farm DS was released in Japan, and thus far it's managed to sell over 40,000 units! It appears that there was a bit of a hardware shortage during the first month of release, as they likely shipped a limited number of copies to test the waters and avoid a nasty scenario in lieu of MF5. During the fourth week, the game sold about 3,200+ units with the first shipment diminishing. However, during the fifth week, the game managed to break 40,000.

I don't have the exact numbers just yet, but it's definitely over 40,000 et al now. Within the next couple of days, I'll have the data for last week's sales.