Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze sold through only 35% of it’s first-week shipment Japan.
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze may have only just released in the US, but Japanese gamers have been enjoying it for over a week now. Media Create, the Japanese company that gathers and analyzes data from the games industry, has now reported that that week has been a somewhat… disappointing one for DK’s return, as the game only managed to sell through 35% of its initial shipment, at around 36,000 copies.
To put that into perspective for you, 2010’s Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii sold 163,000 units in its first week while the 3DS port sold 104,000 units.
That’s quite a downward trend, and Media Create has a few theories as to why this is the case. First up, the Wii U’s considerably smaller install base is partly to blame, but it also speculates that people aren’t being enticed by the incremental upgrades of Tropical Freeze, which is, as our own Jonathan Bolding put it, “the same thing [as Donkey Kong Country Returns] updated to 2014″.
However, Media Create would like to caution people that heavy snowfall, in the Tohoku and Kanto regions of Japan, some of the heaviest it has seen in decades, may have also been a factor in the game’s poor performance.
Media Create does point out that more Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze sales will probably come over a longer period of time due to its evergreen nature.
source: Nintendo Everything
