Disgaea 5 Complete has 110,000 pre-orders between the US and Europe
Disgaea 5 Complete hasn’t launched yet in the west, but it’s already on track to outpace sales in Japan by a large margin.
NIS America president Takuro Yamashita told MCV that pre-orders for the game are sitting at 110,000 copies in the west. Pre-orders are at 78,000 units in the US and 36,000 copies in Europe.
As far as European countries go, Disgaea 5 complete is doing the best in France “because the country has been booming up with the Japanese culture for over last decade,” according to Yamashita. Yamashita also pointed to the inclusion of French text as a “key factor”. While the UK was typically “the biggest market in Europe for the Disgaea series,” that’s not the case with Disgaea 5 Complete, and Yamashita says NIS needs to improve the situation.
Regarding the US, Yamashita noted that it’s the biggest market for Disgaea outside of Japan. He said that it’s “one of the well-recognized JRPGs among such US communities.”
“The era is over for [Japanese games companies] to just rely on the Japanese market. The Japanese video game market is getting smaller. If you look at the recent Tokyo Game Show, you do not feel the momentum that it used to have until five years ago. The Japanese video game market share might be now less than 30 per cent of the world, while I think the western market share accounts for around 70 per cent. Therefore, Japanese games companies need to focus more on the Western market to expand their game business.
“In order to make the NIS Group’s consolidated figures better, our western sales is very important. While the Western pre-order units of Disgaea 5 Switch exceeded 110,000 units, the Japanese sell-in number on the game was unfortunately less than 20,000 units. We had predicted this would happen to some extent. However, we were surprised that the gap was much bigger than we thought.”
Yamashita called Disgaea 5 Complete “a natural fit” for Switch given the franchise’s presence on portable devices over the past decade. NIS America has been working with Nintendo on the game to promote it in the west by including it in Switch’s preview tour and Nintendo Directs.
