Disgaea 5 originally launched for PlayStation 4 back in 2015, and a Switch version, Disgaea 5 Complete, was released as a launch title for the console in Japan when it released back in the beginning of March.
However, the Japanese sales of the game were disappointingly low, coming in at only about 20,000 units sold. That said, NIS is looking to the western launch of the Switch version with higher hopes. Already, approximately 110,000 units have been preordered between Europe and the US combined.
NIS America’s Takuro Yamashita recently spoke to MCV about the prospective sales, noting that the US is the biggest market for Disgaea games outside of Japan. He also went on to mention the importance of western sales and the company’s surprise at the disparity between the Japanese sales in comparison to the western sales.
Here are Yamashita’s full comments:
“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.”
Additionally, Direct-Feed Games has put together a video comparing the PS4 and Switch versions of the game. In the footage below, we can see that while there is little difference between the game’s visually, the Switch version does in fact load a tiny bit faster than the PS4 version.
Disgaea 5 Complete will release for the Nintendo Switch on May 23rd in North America and May 26th in Europe and PAL regions.
