Researching the project's sales and success

Just did some quick/additional research to what I already follow in a response to a question that I often see: did this game sell/do well? And is it enough to warrant a series/sequels? Short answer: absolutely yes. Long answer:

I track and follow this stuff myself, because I'm really into knowing the success of the game and how far it's going. So here are some sales estimations -

After just a week of the Steam release, it hit the 500k-1m owners mark. That's still the range it has on Steam Spy/steamdb, but since it's been a year later, probably closer to the 1m side now. Every once in a while, I go over there to see if it's past that yet.

steamdb.info/app/692850/graphs/

For PS4, we have things like gamstat: gamstat.com/games/Bloodstained_Ritual_of_the_Night/

Currently, that's at about 310k, but it's players of the game rather than sales/owners. That could be lower or higher, but it's a rough idea of where it is compared to other things.

The Switch version, it famously outsold all the other versions in the UK, so it's safe to assume it's at least somewhere around where the PS4 sales are, if not higher. We'll give that another 310k.

The Xbox and GOG sales will make up the smallest part, and I have no data at all on that, but I'll throw out maybe 50k combined between them.

Add all this together, you get (conservatively) 1.17m - 1.67m for Ritual of the Night. With them being more independent now and not Konami salary workers, the game was probably pretty profitable and perhaps most importantly, far and away the single highest selling game Iga has ever made. These numbers are all I could dig up for older Castlevania game sales, from a user on neogaf (this does not seem to include re-releases and reprints mind you):


My response to these numbers (I just saw them when I was looking around for the data on this post) was basically disbelief. I'd seen something over 1m for SotN before, and I think that may at least be the case when you count PS1 OG and GH, XBL and PSN re-releases.

But I'm not done, let's look at some other stuff related to this and sales/success for this project: CotM. This game in its first 10 days was celebrated to receive 100k downloads officially by the Inti Creates social media accounts. It was at that time the best selling game on the Switch eshop. A subsequent tweet with a graph broke that down further to:

Platform sales:




Switch – 56%
Steam – 19%
PlayStation 4 – 17%
3DS – 4%
PlayStation Vita – 4%

Xbox's version wasn't released yet at that time. Currently, SteamSpy estimates 100k-200k for CotM on Steam alone.

steamdb.info/app/838310/graphs/

If that's still around 19% of the sales, then Switch probably has something more like 300-500k, PS4 itself a 100k, etc. So, CotM now in total would be more like 500k-1m by itself.

What's funny in comparison to CotM is something priced exactly the same that has probably sold about as many copies: Iga's Back Pack. I think it's entirely possible that this $10 DLC sold to around 500k of Ritual of the Night's user base, which would put both its cost and sales similar to the $10 CotM. Now, Curse of the Moon is an Inti Creates product and Iga/ArtPlay gets those profits only in part, but it's similarly the case with 505 Games, WayForward and others for Ritual of the Night + paid DLC. In either case, though, a better situation than with Konami. Konami was generally never impressed with Castlevania's sales under Iga.

So, the tl;dr here is that Bloodstained as a project has been *very* successful and its sales are impressive. My prediction pre-release was that it would hit 2 million, and I don't think we're far off. I was serious then and I am now, but I got just laughs and doubters back then ;p

edit: I should note, I think I'm lowballing Switch a bit. The gap for CotM platform sales there is huge - and I doubt RotN's sales are 3x higher on Switch than the others, but probably a good bit higher than the 310k I give it here. Something like this itself could push it to 2m, though.