It seems Disgaea 5 will be a hit on the Switch, at least in the west.
Speaking with MCVUK, Takuro Yamashita revealed something very interesting.
“The UK has been historically the biggest market in Europe for the Disgaea series,” Yamashita stated. “However, talking about Disgaea 5 Complete, the UK is not the biggest one [any more]. I am not sure why this happened. We really need to improve the UK situation for Disgaea 5 Complete.
“The best country in Europe is France because the country has been booming up with the Japanese culture for over last decade,” Yamashita continued. “Another key factor of performing well in France is Disgaea 5 Complete’s support for French text.”
The US, of course, still remains the biggest market for Disgaea outside of Japan, with Yamashita saying it has “a larger JRPG fan base than any other country” besides its native homeland. He also says Disgaea is “one of the well-recognised JRPGs among such US communities.”
Indeed, the western market is becoming increasingly important for NIS America: “The era is over for [Japanese games companies] to just rely on the Japanese market,” says Yamashita.
“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.”
Why this is so important however, is the fact that with these preorders, the game has outpaced the PS4 version which sold 112 000 copies in the west after release. Again, the Switch version numbers are all preorder numbers, so this means the Switch version of the game will have outsold the PS4 version. This is a big deal for the Switch, as it shows third parties that their games can do even better on the platform than on the PlayStation 4, which could lead to more third party support.