- Joined
- Aug 22, 2018
With very little being known about concrete sales of Shenmue III, I thought I’d dig into the information we have to try and give a rough estimation of how many copies of the game are in circulation today. I’ll be looking at confirmed numbers and then making some estimates using a few different methods to try and come up with a realistic estimate for how many copies of the game have been sold.
Confirmed:
By removing the lowest tier from the Kickstarter rewards page, we can see that 67,069 copies of the game were provided via Kickstarter. It’s hard to say how many additional copies were sent out following the slacker backer campaign and we can only guess the distribution in terms of PS4 vs Epic.
According to Dengeki’s week 48 figures, Shenmue III had sold 19,891 physical copies on PS4 as of December 1st. As the game has failed to re-enter the Japanese top 50, we do not know how many additional copies have been sold in the two months since this nor do we know how many digital copies were sold in Japan. (* since the time of writing, forum user Crimson has pointed out that an issue of the Dengeki magazine quoted total sales of 20,866. I’m not sure of the period this includes and won’t be recalculating all of my estimates as the increase is pretty negligible. For those interested however, confirmed sales are actually 975 higher than the number quoted later in this post.).
According to The Spanish Top 10 for week 47, Shenmue III sold 1,900 copies between the 18th and the 24th of November.
Limited Run released a collector’s edition of the game which was limited to 5,000 copies.
Pix n Love released a collectors edition of the game which was limited to 2,500 copies.
Unconfirmed
During its opening week, Shenmue 3 was number 17 in the UK charts, with sites stating that it sold half or just over half of what the rereleases sold last year. It seems that the remasters sold 10,162 copies in its opening week, which would suggest that Shenmue 3 sold little over 5,000 copies.
The average backer on Kickstarter pledged $91.36 with 96.8% of backers pledging enough for a copy of the game. An additional $846,215 was generated through a further 11,767 backers during The Slacker Backer Campaign period with an average pledge of $71.91. Applying the same percentage drop observed in backer donations (-21%) to the percentage of Kickstarter backers who pledged enough for a copy of the game, we can estimate that 76.2% of slacker backers, or 8,965, were provided with a backer copy.
This means that by December first, there were 96,360 copies of the game confirmed to be in circulation or 110,325 if the above estimates for week 1 sales in the UK and Slacker Backer copies are included.
Speculation
In terms of sales, we are still missing worldwide digital sales and physical sales for every country outside of Spain, The UK and Japan.
We have very little to go by other than the game charting in some European countries, although we do know that the HD remasters sold 87,676 copies on PS4 in its opening week with a further 43,121 copies sold in the game’s opening 2 weeks in the Japanese market (it launched a few months later there).
We’ve already seen that Shenmue 3 sold about half as many copies in it’s opening week in The UK as the remasters did and the data for Japan seems to confirm this pattern (although sales of the remasters in Japan were somewhat conflated by people importing the special edition).
This would suggest that around 43,838 physical copies were sold worldwide (excluding Japan), so removing the 6,900 copies we have already included for sales in Spain and The UK, we have an additional 36,938 physical sales.
With digital sales on PS4 accounting for 53% of all game sales, the 63,729 physical sales of the standard edition of the game we’ve calculated so far would suggest that there were a further 71,865 copies of the game sold digitally through the PlayStation Store.
Factoring in these additional copies, we are now looking at 219,128 copies of the game in circulation by December first, with 143,094 of those being sales. This estimate does not include sales on the Epic Game Store nor does it include the standard limited edition of the game which was sold on sites like Amazon and Game under a different SKU.
Growth
As many of you may know, I’ve been tracking the growth of users who have played Shenmue III on several trophy sites since the 10th of December. Observed growth is as follows...
Continuous growth (12/10 - 01/29)
PSN Profiles: 851->1696 (+99%).
True Trophies: 956->1315 (+38%).
PSN Trophy Leaders: 1900->2822 (+49%).
Average growth across the three sites is 62%.
Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of the 76,034 backers requested a PS4 copy, so we need to do a little more guess work here. I’ll do a few different calculations here to account for a few different splits.
A. Only 50% of backers chose a PS4 copy and lowest tracked growth (38%). 249,933 PS4 copies in circulation with a further 38,017 backer copies and whatever the game has sold on Epic since launch. 211,916 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
B. 75% of backers chose a PS4 copy and lowest tracked growth (38%). 276,165 PS4 copies in circulation with a further 19,008 backer copies and whatever else the game has sold on Epic since launch. 219,139 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
C. Only 50% of backers chose a PS4 copy and average tracked growth (62%). 293,400 copies of the game in circulation with a further 38,017 backer copies and whatever else the game has sold on Epic since launch. 255,383 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
D. 75% of backers chose a PS4 copy and average tracked growth (62%). 324,194 copies of the game in circulation with a further 19,008 backer copies and whatever else the game has sold on Epic since launch. 267,168 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
Alternative method 1: DLC
Lately I’ve been tracking DLC sales as a percentage of total players using trophy sites. What I failed to realize was that I could actually get a much more accurate idea of this percentage by looking at the trophies directly on PSN. According to the figures at the time of writing, at least 1.1% of players have bought and played the DLC.
The results of this poll suggest that 50% of Dojo users have already purchased and played the DLC. Of course we can’t apply this figure to everyone who purchased the game as not everybody is as crazy about Shenmue as members of this forum, but perhaps there is a way to establish how many serious fans of the series there are.
We need only look as far as the Kickstarter where the average backer pledged nearly $100 to secure a third entry in the series. Of course not all of the 80,000 or so backers can be considered hardcore Shenmue fans, but the rewards page of the Kickstarter page provides a handy breakdown of backers that could help us establish how many are.
40,449 people pledged $60 or higher with 19,048 of those pledging $100 or more.
If only 10% of the backers who pledged $60+ bought and played the DLC and 75% of those played on PS4, that would mean at least 3,034 people bought it. We know that 1.1% of total players have played the DLC, so these 3,034 players alone would suggest that the total number of players on PS4 is 275,828.
If 20% of the backers who pledged $100+ bought and played the DLC (none of the people who pledged less) and 75% of those played on PS4, that would mean that at least 2,858 people bought the DLC. This would suggest that the total number of players on PS4 is 259,818.
If 10% of people who pledged $60-$80 and 20% of people who pledged $100+ bought and played the DLC and 75% of them played on PS4, that would mean that at least 4,463 people bought the DLC. This would suggest that the total number of players on PS4 is 405,727.
If 0% of people who pledged $1-$59 (28,871->0), 10% of people who pledged $60-$99 (21,401->2,140), 20% of people who pledged $100-$199 (12,431->2,486), 30% of people who pledged $200-$299 (1,170->351), 40% of people who pledged $300-$399 (3,141->1,255) and 50% of people who pledged $500+ (2,306->1,153) bought and played the DLC and 75% of them played on PS4 (7,385->5,539), that would mean that there were 5,539 sales of the DLC on PS4 and a total PS4 player base of 503,545 (based on Sony’s assertion that 1.1% of the total playerbase has played the DLC).
These numbers may seem pretty high, but we’ve no reason to doubt Sony’s trophy information (as far as I’m aware it’s machine calculated) and to believe that 8% of Kickstarter backers have purchased and played the DLC doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.
If sales really were 500,000+ (which I could very easily believe looking at these numbers), assuming that not a single one of the 420,000+ none-backers purchased the DLC is far more difficult to believe. Even if only 1% of these new players purchased the DLC, that would boost the total playerbase towards the 1m mark.
Alternative method 2: Trophy Sites.
Below are the total number of registered PS4 users on four of the largest trophy sites and the current number of tracked Shenmue III players on each site.
PSN Profiles: 1,713 / 2,077,146 (0.08%)
True Trophies: 1,315 / 47,329 (2.8%)
PSN Trophy Leaders: 2,822 / 550,574 (0.5%)
Exophase: 1,510 / 64,308 (2.3%)
True Trophies and Exophase seem to provide comparable sample groups with PSN Profiles providing an incredibly poor sample group. I suspect this is down to them refreshing their user base’s trophies in chunks rather than doing them all at the same time. This would explain why they consistently show higher growth than any of the other sites. I’ll include them in my calculations, but have serious reservations about the reliability of the data that doing so will yield.
In March 2019, there were apparently 94m active PSN users. Assuming the same percentage of all PSN users have played Shenmue 3 as those registered on our trophy sites, we get the following estimates for total players.
PSN Profiles: 75,200
True Trophies: 2,632,000
PSN Trophy Leaders: 470,000
Exophase: 2,162,000
As we can see, these numbers are clearly wrong and fluctuate wildly from site to site. This is similar to the methodology used by sites like Gamestat which is why their numbers are so inaccurate (they’re still reporting that the number of total players is less than the number of backer copies).
It’s possible that Shenmue 3 is just incredibly popular with trophy hunters, but I think it far more likely that Sony are over-reporting the number of active PSN users. It also looks like Exophase and true trophies purge inactive users from time to time whilst the other two sites do not.
Alternative method 3: Gamestat
You’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘But didn’t he just say that trying to use numbers from trophy sites is pointless due to the unreliability of the sample groups?’. Whilst I don’t think they’re a good measure for exact sales, I do think the growth that they show should be fairly representative of overall growth in the playerbase.
Today, I came across this page, which shows the worldwide distribution of tracked Shenmue III players. Although the sample group is only around 4,000 by my calculation, that should be large enough to provide a fairly accurate idea of where players are based in the overall playerbase. The numbers seem to be fairly in keeping with the numbers we have for Spain and The UK, so I think they should be reliable enough to work with.
According to Gamestat, 22% of tracked players are based in Japan. Knowing that there were 19,891 confirmed physical sales in Japan by December 1st, this would suggest that there were 90,414 total physical sales at that time.
This in turn casts doubt on our earlier estimate for world-wide physical sales of the standard version of the game (excluding Japan). Rather than the 43,838 I predicted, the Gamestat data suggests that 70,523 physical copies of the game were sold.
For the first time, it also allows us to make a reasonable estimate as to the number of physical copies of the game sold in The US (28,028) during the opening few weeks of sales.
With this in mind, we now have 90,414 worldwide physical sales, 101,956 digital worldwide sales, 7,500 special edition copies sold and 76,034 Kickstarter and Slacker backer copies for a grand total of 275,904 copies in circulation by December 1st.
If we plug this new total into the calculation for scenario D in the growth section, we get 389,938 sales on PS4 (446,964 - 57,026) with a further 76,034 backer copies plus whatever the game has sold on Epic and the sales from the standard limited edition that was sold in Europe.
Conclusions
Aside from the confirmed data we have, there is a lot of guess work involved at this point. I’ve tried my best to be conservative in my estimations and explain how I’ve come to those conclusions. I’ve thrown a lot of data around and used a lot of different methods to try and predict growth, but what does it all mean?
I think that the poor sample group provided by PSN Profiles lead to unrealistic growth (99%), which in turn increased the average growth to an unrealistically high level (62%). As I started tracking growth on the 10th of December and our confirmed figures and speculation only cover up to the first of December though, I think 62% may not be too far off from the growth seen since the first of December.
About 1 month ago, a Dojo user suggested that someone working for Epic had told him that there were between twenty and thirty thousand copies of the game registered on the Epic launcher. This makes me think that an estimate of 19,000 backer copies on Epic probably isn’t too far off the mark (75% PS4 / 25% Epic split).
The DLC data suggests that sales are doing very well and whilst there are some issues with this data (it doesn’t account for new fans, it doesn’t account for people who are no longer fans of the series), I don’t think it’s too far off. If anything, it suggests that my other estimates may be too low.
Gamestat’s geographical data suggests that initial estimates for worldwide sales may have been underestimated by a fairly considerable amount. Considering my disdain for Gamestat’s poor prediction of total players, I find it a little ironic that their geographical information has probably provided some of the most accurate data in this post. It’s also in keeping with the data provided through DLC sales.
With these things in mind...
TLDR; I think that there are now more than 500,000 copies of Shenmue 3 in circulation (including backer copies). I predict, assuming growth remains steady, that within 30 days sales will have broken the 500,000 mark (assuming they haven’t already) and expect an announcement from Deep Silver by the end of February.
Confirmed:
By removing the lowest tier from the Kickstarter rewards page, we can see that 67,069 copies of the game were provided via Kickstarter. It’s hard to say how many additional copies were sent out following the slacker backer campaign and we can only guess the distribution in terms of PS4 vs Epic.
According to Dengeki’s week 48 figures, Shenmue III had sold 19,891 physical copies on PS4 as of December 1st. As the game has failed to re-enter the Japanese top 50, we do not know how many additional copies have been sold in the two months since this nor do we know how many digital copies were sold in Japan. (* since the time of writing, forum user Crimson has pointed out that an issue of the Dengeki magazine quoted total sales of 20,866. I’m not sure of the period this includes and won’t be recalculating all of my estimates as the increase is pretty negligible. For those interested however, confirmed sales are actually 975 higher than the number quoted later in this post.).
According to The Spanish Top 10 for week 47, Shenmue III sold 1,900 copies between the 18th and the 24th of November.
Limited Run released a collector’s edition of the game which was limited to 5,000 copies.
Pix n Love released a collectors edition of the game which was limited to 2,500 copies.
Unconfirmed
During its opening week, Shenmue 3 was number 17 in the UK charts, with sites stating that it sold half or just over half of what the rereleases sold last year. It seems that the remasters sold 10,162 copies in its opening week, which would suggest that Shenmue 3 sold little over 5,000 copies.
The average backer on Kickstarter pledged $91.36 with 96.8% of backers pledging enough for a copy of the game. An additional $846,215 was generated through a further 11,767 backers during The Slacker Backer Campaign period with an average pledge of $71.91. Applying the same percentage drop observed in backer donations (-21%) to the percentage of Kickstarter backers who pledged enough for a copy of the game, we can estimate that 76.2% of slacker backers, or 8,965, were provided with a backer copy.
This means that by December first, there were 96,360 copies of the game confirmed to be in circulation or 110,325 if the above estimates for week 1 sales in the UK and Slacker Backer copies are included.
Speculation
In terms of sales, we are still missing worldwide digital sales and physical sales for every country outside of Spain, The UK and Japan.
We have very little to go by other than the game charting in some European countries, although we do know that the HD remasters sold 87,676 copies on PS4 in its opening week with a further 43,121 copies sold in the game’s opening 2 weeks in the Japanese market (it launched a few months later there).
We’ve already seen that Shenmue 3 sold about half as many copies in it’s opening week in The UK as the remasters did and the data for Japan seems to confirm this pattern (although sales of the remasters in Japan were somewhat conflated by people importing the special edition).
This would suggest that around 43,838 physical copies were sold worldwide (excluding Japan), so removing the 6,900 copies we have already included for sales in Spain and The UK, we have an additional 36,938 physical sales.
With digital sales on PS4 accounting for 53% of all game sales, the 63,729 physical sales of the standard edition of the game we’ve calculated so far would suggest that there were a further 71,865 copies of the game sold digitally through the PlayStation Store.
Factoring in these additional copies, we are now looking at 219,128 copies of the game in circulation by December first, with 143,094 of those being sales. This estimate does not include sales on the Epic Game Store nor does it include the standard limited edition of the game which was sold on sites like Amazon and Game under a different SKU.
Growth
As many of you may know, I’ve been tracking the growth of users who have played Shenmue III on several trophy sites since the 10th of December. Observed growth is as follows...
Continuous growth (12/10 - 01/29)
PSN Profiles: 851->1696 (+99%).
True Trophies: 956->1315 (+38%).
PSN Trophy Leaders: 1900->2822 (+49%).
Average growth across the three sites is 62%.
Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of the 76,034 backers requested a PS4 copy, so we need to do a little more guess work here. I’ll do a few different calculations here to account for a few different splits.
A. Only 50% of backers chose a PS4 copy and lowest tracked growth (38%). 249,933 PS4 copies in circulation with a further 38,017 backer copies and whatever the game has sold on Epic since launch. 211,916 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
B. 75% of backers chose a PS4 copy and lowest tracked growth (38%). 276,165 PS4 copies in circulation with a further 19,008 backer copies and whatever else the game has sold on Epic since launch. 219,139 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
C. Only 50% of backers chose a PS4 copy and average tracked growth (62%). 293,400 copies of the game in circulation with a further 38,017 backer copies and whatever else the game has sold on Epic since launch. 255,383 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
D. 75% of backers chose a PS4 copy and average tracked growth (62%). 324,194 copies of the game in circulation with a further 19,008 backer copies and whatever else the game has sold on Epic since launch. 267,168 sales on PS4 (physical and digital).
Alternative method 1: DLC
Lately I’ve been tracking DLC sales as a percentage of total players using trophy sites. What I failed to realize was that I could actually get a much more accurate idea of this percentage by looking at the trophies directly on PSN. According to the figures at the time of writing, at least 1.1% of players have bought and played the DLC.
The results of this poll suggest that 50% of Dojo users have already purchased and played the DLC. Of course we can’t apply this figure to everyone who purchased the game as not everybody is as crazy about Shenmue as members of this forum, but perhaps there is a way to establish how many serious fans of the series there are.
We need only look as far as the Kickstarter where the average backer pledged nearly $100 to secure a third entry in the series. Of course not all of the 80,000 or so backers can be considered hardcore Shenmue fans, but the rewards page of the Kickstarter page provides a handy breakdown of backers that could help us establish how many are.
40,449 people pledged $60 or higher with 19,048 of those pledging $100 or more.
If only 10% of the backers who pledged $60+ bought and played the DLC and 75% of those played on PS4, that would mean at least 3,034 people bought it. We know that 1.1% of total players have played the DLC, so these 3,034 players alone would suggest that the total number of players on PS4 is 275,828.
If 20% of the backers who pledged $100+ bought and played the DLC (none of the people who pledged less) and 75% of those played on PS4, that would mean that at least 2,858 people bought the DLC. This would suggest that the total number of players on PS4 is 259,818.
If 10% of people who pledged $60-$80 and 20% of people who pledged $100+ bought and played the DLC and 75% of them played on PS4, that would mean that at least 4,463 people bought the DLC. This would suggest that the total number of players on PS4 is 405,727.
If 0% of people who pledged $1-$59 (28,871->0), 10% of people who pledged $60-$99 (21,401->2,140), 20% of people who pledged $100-$199 (12,431->2,486), 30% of people who pledged $200-$299 (1,170->351), 40% of people who pledged $300-$399 (3,141->1,255) and 50% of people who pledged $500+ (2,306->1,153) bought and played the DLC and 75% of them played on PS4 (7,385->5,539), that would mean that there were 5,539 sales of the DLC on PS4 and a total PS4 player base of 503,545 (based on Sony’s assertion that 1.1% of the total playerbase has played the DLC).
These numbers may seem pretty high, but we’ve no reason to doubt Sony’s trophy information (as far as I’m aware it’s machine calculated) and to believe that 8% of Kickstarter backers have purchased and played the DLC doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.
If sales really were 500,000+ (which I could very easily believe looking at these numbers), assuming that not a single one of the 420,000+ none-backers purchased the DLC is far more difficult to believe. Even if only 1% of these new players purchased the DLC, that would boost the total playerbase towards the 1m mark.
Alternative method 2: Trophy Sites.
Below are the total number of registered PS4 users on four of the largest trophy sites and the current number of tracked Shenmue III players on each site.
PSN Profiles: 1,713 / 2,077,146 (0.08%)
True Trophies: 1,315 / 47,329 (2.8%)
PSN Trophy Leaders: 2,822 / 550,574 (0.5%)
Exophase: 1,510 / 64,308 (2.3%)
True Trophies and Exophase seem to provide comparable sample groups with PSN Profiles providing an incredibly poor sample group. I suspect this is down to them refreshing their user base’s trophies in chunks rather than doing them all at the same time. This would explain why they consistently show higher growth than any of the other sites. I’ll include them in my calculations, but have serious reservations about the reliability of the data that doing so will yield.
In March 2019, there were apparently 94m active PSN users. Assuming the same percentage of all PSN users have played Shenmue 3 as those registered on our trophy sites, we get the following estimates for total players.
PSN Profiles: 75,200
True Trophies: 2,632,000
PSN Trophy Leaders: 470,000
Exophase: 2,162,000
As we can see, these numbers are clearly wrong and fluctuate wildly from site to site. This is similar to the methodology used by sites like Gamestat which is why their numbers are so inaccurate (they’re still reporting that the number of total players is less than the number of backer copies).
It’s possible that Shenmue 3 is just incredibly popular with trophy hunters, but I think it far more likely that Sony are over-reporting the number of active PSN users. It also looks like Exophase and true trophies purge inactive users from time to time whilst the other two sites do not.
Alternative method 3: Gamestat
You’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘But didn’t he just say that trying to use numbers from trophy sites is pointless due to the unreliability of the sample groups?’. Whilst I don’t think they’re a good measure for exact sales, I do think the growth that they show should be fairly representative of overall growth in the playerbase.
Today, I came across this page, which shows the worldwide distribution of tracked Shenmue III players. Although the sample group is only around 4,000 by my calculation, that should be large enough to provide a fairly accurate idea of where players are based in the overall playerbase. The numbers seem to be fairly in keeping with the numbers we have for Spain and The UK, so I think they should be reliable enough to work with.
According to Gamestat, 22% of tracked players are based in Japan. Knowing that there were 19,891 confirmed physical sales in Japan by December 1st, this would suggest that there were 90,414 total physical sales at that time.
This in turn casts doubt on our earlier estimate for world-wide physical sales of the standard version of the game (excluding Japan). Rather than the 43,838 I predicted, the Gamestat data suggests that 70,523 physical copies of the game were sold.
For the first time, it also allows us to make a reasonable estimate as to the number of physical copies of the game sold in The US (28,028) during the opening few weeks of sales.
With this in mind, we now have 90,414 worldwide physical sales, 101,956 digital worldwide sales, 7,500 special edition copies sold and 76,034 Kickstarter and Slacker backer copies for a grand total of 275,904 copies in circulation by December 1st.
If we plug this new total into the calculation for scenario D in the growth section, we get 389,938 sales on PS4 (446,964 - 57,026) with a further 76,034 backer copies plus whatever the game has sold on Epic and the sales from the standard limited edition that was sold in Europe.
Conclusions
Aside from the confirmed data we have, there is a lot of guess work involved at this point. I’ve tried my best to be conservative in my estimations and explain how I’ve come to those conclusions. I’ve thrown a lot of data around and used a lot of different methods to try and predict growth, but what does it all mean?
I think that the poor sample group provided by PSN Profiles lead to unrealistic growth (99%), which in turn increased the average growth to an unrealistically high level (62%). As I started tracking growth on the 10th of December and our confirmed figures and speculation only cover up to the first of December though, I think 62% may not be too far off from the growth seen since the first of December.
About 1 month ago, a Dojo user suggested that someone working for Epic had told him that there were between twenty and thirty thousand copies of the game registered on the Epic launcher. This makes me think that an estimate of 19,000 backer copies on Epic probably isn’t too far off the mark (75% PS4 / 25% Epic split).
The DLC data suggests that sales are doing very well and whilst there are some issues with this data (it doesn’t account for new fans, it doesn’t account for people who are no longer fans of the series), I don’t think it’s too far off. If anything, it suggests that my other estimates may be too low.
Gamestat’s geographical data suggests that initial estimates for worldwide sales may have been underestimated by a fairly considerable amount. Considering my disdain for Gamestat’s poor prediction of total players, I find it a little ironic that their geographical information has probably provided some of the most accurate data in this post. It’s also in keeping with the data provided through DLC sales.
With these things in mind...
TLDR; I think that there are now more than 500,000 copies of Shenmue 3 in circulation (including backer copies). I predict, assuming growth remains steady, that within 30 days sales will have broken the 500,000 mark (assuming they haven’t already) and expect an announcement from Deep Silver by the end of February.
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