Magician’s Quest: Konami’s Secret Hit In Japan

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Last week, Konami released a Nintendo 3DS game titled Magician’s Quest: Town of Magic in Japan. This is a life-simulation game (similar to Animal Crossing in a way) that has the player attending a magic academy and living the life of a wizard. Town of Magic is the fourth game in the Magician’s Quest series, with the previous three games having being released on the Nintendo DS.

 

When Konami announced that they were going to release the fourth game while Animal Crossing: New Leaf—a very popular game in the same genre—was busy steamrolling everything in its path, we were worried that Town of Magic was going to be overlooked by its target market. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

 

Magician’s Quest: Town of Magic sold 51,396 copies in its first week. That isn’t a large figure, but it is a slightly stronger debut than the previous two games in the series. For comparison, here’s how the other Magician’s Quest games have sold in their opening week in years past:

 

(2008) Magician’s Quest: Mysterious Times – 71,914

(2010) Magician’s Quest: The Merchant’s Store of Sorcery – 40,208

(2011) Magician’s Quest: The Stylish Wizard – 46,042

 

Now, you might be wondering why we’re choosing to highlight this series of games, specifically. 40-50k in opening week isn’t a whole lot. Plenty of games sell that much in their first week on store shelves. The catch here is that all Magician’s Quest games have one thing in common—they start out slow, but sell and sell and sell over a period of several months and years.

 

To put this into perspective, numbers from sales tracker, Media Create, put the sales of Magician’s Quest: Mysterious Times at 473,357 copies sold by the end of 2010. Meanwhile, The Merchant’s Store of Sorcery had sold 427,224  copies by the end of 2011. Something else to note is that those sales figures don’t account for budget re-release versions, which add even more to the sales total.

 

Magician’s Quest may not be the most well-known franchise among enthusiast gamers, but it’s been doing well for Konami. It should be very interesting to see what figures Magician’s Quest: Town of Magic ends up at, a couple of years down the line.

 

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Author
Ishaan Sahdev
Ishaan specializes in game design/sales analysis. He's the former managing editor of Siliconera and wrote the book "The Legend of Zelda - A Complete Development History". He also used to moonlight as a professional manga editor. These days, his day job has nothing to do with games, but the two inform each other nonetheless.