I'm starting to think Strive didn't sell as well as most are claiming. I saw that Japan first week sales figures, which was around 11k, and cross referenced it with articles stating it sold over 300k* (
this number takes into account digital sales because it's based on data from August 2022) units in the first week. Taking this number, we can easily see the PC sales numbers with Steam showing around 30k (which is what Steam peaked at). Knowing all of this, it pretty much tells us that the mass majority of sales were overseas console sales at least in the first week.
Edit: *Correction,
checking what ArcSys stated, they only shipped 300k worldwide in the first week, so no actual sales being reported in the first week. No one has confirmed the 300k being actual units sold, only shipped. This reinforces that sales were awful in Japan in the first week.
It then reached 500k a month later in July, but we know it wasn't from Steam sales because the Steam player base dropped by 20k players going by the charts. Those numbers continued to drop until dlc characters released, but not a single one of those characters, including Bridget, got them numbers like the first month. It can be assumed consoles suffered the same drop in players because that's the nature of fighting games.
This confirms that the primary area of sales were, obviously, on consoles. It took over a year to reach a million units, which we don't even know if it's an accurate number due to shipped/sales inaccuracies. It may have actually been Bridget being released that got it to 1 million units. Japanese players had been begging for Bridget to be added this past year going by popularity votes. It's entirely possible when Bridget was announced that sales in Japan jumped, but not likely enough to make all that much of a difference compared to international sales. Everything we know about the reception of the game in Japan has been not great. Even as far back as the beta we saw a lot of flack coming from the Japanese player base, that flack seems to have only increased as time has gone on.
With all of this information it can be concluded that the mass majority of all sales were outside of Japan. Now, I know I said it didn't sell as well as claimed, but it's still the best selling compared to all the previous games from what I can tell. It's pretty clear that ArcSys will do everything it can to pander to the larger market.
Now, the important part,
none of that shit matters if barely anyone is actually playing the game. GG has always been a niche game and it continues to be as such especially after they alienated their original player base. I touched on it while talking about the Steam numbers, but here's a clearer picture involving both Steam and PS:
Steam numbers are easy to find, recent numbers are only peaking at around 3.4k in the last 24 hours. GGS doesn't seem to be sold on any other platform other than Steam for PC, so those numbers are done.
Console numbers are a lot trickier, but thanks to some work back in December of 2021, we have an idea of what the PS player count could be. Seen
here, we have a person who was looking into popular characters found something interesting. It looks like that majority of players by Dec 21 were on PC and not PS4 or PS5. These numbers are based on the amounts of times characters were used at least once online.
Xbox doesn't even need to be factored because that version isn't coming out until next year.
As far as I can tell by looking at what data is available, the actual player count that is actively playing the game on all platforms most likely peaks around 5k worldwide daily. That amount isn't bad at all for a year old fighting game... except that a highly anticipated character released barely a month prior. Steam shows a pretty good spike in active players at that time, hitting around 11k and then losing nearly 6k active players in two weeks. It can be assumed that console players reacted the same way, played Bridget for a bit and then moved on to other games.
This game is apart of a niche series that is only just now mildly popular do to them making massive changes to how the game is played.
This unfortunately will cement how they make games from now on, but I doubt they'll see numbers like this again. Bottom line, it sold well compared to previous GG titles, but was pretty average compared to anything else released in the same month or against other fighting games.
Feel free to destroy anything I said here, I only spent around an hour looking into this stuff, so it's entirely possible I missed something.
