Morning reports from Japan have confirmed the 3DS exclusive Hero Bank, SEGA’s latest new IP aimed at children, will be getting a sequel later this year. For those following the SEGA in the Charts articles I post, people will remember Hero Bank originally entered the charts with below average numbers, debuting with disappointing sales of 15,060. But unlike most titles, Hero Bank did not simply end up leaving the charts the next week, infact the title continued to sell over the course of the next few months and eventually managed to garner over 50,000 sales.
It seems that was enough to convince SEGA to move forward with not just an arcade game but a full blown sequel. I think we can chalk down Hero Bank as another IP from SEGA that would be left in their native land without any announcement of localising either the anime or the game. Hero Bank 2 will be releasing later this year on 27th November and helps to stack up a very busy Q3 period adding to heavy hitters like Alien, Sonic Boom and Phantasy Star Nova.
Any trailer available ?
No, I’d imagine we won’t have to wait long since TGS is just round the corner.
no Yakuza 5 because they fear to lose money for a cheap localization, but yes to the sequel of a failing game…
And profits go down, but yes it’s all western packaged game fault…
The Ryu Ga Gotoku games are my favourite video games but they, along with Binary Domain (another favourite) etc are precisely why SEGA ended losing so much money. It wasn’t Western packaged sales (Total War and Football Manager are not the problem) but the other titles they were bringing over.
And localisations are not as cheap as people believe it to be. If you go to NeoGAF, you can often find people from Atlus, XSeed all say it’s more expensive than people think they are. Furthermore Yakuza 5 is about twice the size of the biggest Yakuza games so the costs are doubled from previous games.
Final point, SEGA’s consumer division made profits last year following a horrendous $150 mil loss in the consumer division and I would imagine profits will be up this year further, the fortunes of the company are not in a decline.
Why not a Rhythm Thief 2 then?
I guess it’s the merchandising.
I’d imagine that, plus the licensing deals for an anime, manga etc all played a part. That and the game is yet to go significantly down in price.
Surprising as I didn’t think it would be doing more than a 1,000 a week at this point.
Didn’t Rhythm Thief perform poorly everywhere? I am pretty sure I had read that this was the case at least in Japan. Which makes me sad…
lol. The first game came out in March of this year. This is crazy. What are they going to do as far as content? Perhaps they’ll reuse most assets or something? The Mega Man Battle Network series did that for a lot of its entries. And after a quick look, coincidentally the first and second entries of the MMBN series came out in the same year in Japan!
It’s easy to see Hero Bank is a pretty cheap production, I doubt they’re going to rework the town graphics or what not.
nice aki i appreciate all of the clarifications
I don’t think we can call this game a flop. Simply because it is getting a sequel, it’s clear that through merchandise and licensing + game sales means Hero Bank is actually a bit successful.
The other thing to factor is the game is still ridiculously close to full price months after release, Amazon lists it with only a 15% discount, meaning SEGA and retailers seem happy over sales.
I think due to SEGA releasing a sequel, it would imply the Hero Bank hardly flopped.
Second we have no idea what the localization costs are for Yakuza 5. We know that SEGA still localize small projects, three Miku titles in testament to that. However it seems that Yakuza 5 is just too big, the game is twice/thrice the length of a normal Yakuza game and SEGA already use to cut corners to make Yakuza profitable but it never worked out for them over here.
Unless they want to take a vanity project on (Very unlikely) I doubt they would try translating Yakuza 5. I’d also imagine the Haruka segment (About 3 to 4 hours if you want to blast through it) would alienate some fans of the series. It all adds up with Yakuza 5 not being as straight forward simple job.
And that’s without taking opportunity cost into account.