One of the more interesting panels coming out of TGS was this talk show on D3 Publisher's Ed-0: Zombie Uprising, a Lancarse-developed roguelike action game with the key points of "high-difficulty action", "heavy randomness" and "Japanese setting x zombies", which launched in July on PS5/XB/Steam after a hefty period in early access... and has sold extremely poorly, especially given it's one of D3P's more ambitious projects; moreover, ~ 50% of the sales they have achieved are from within Japan, which tells them the game has virtually zero penetration elsewhere.
As a response, D3P's producers staged this talk show with Famitsu's EIC Katsuhiko Hayashi, Bandai-Namco's Katsuhiro Harada (widely known for being the veteran Tekken producer, but also currently responsible for B-N's global marketing strategy) and CyberConnect2 president Hiroshi Matsuyama where they talked openly about why they think it didn't sell, based on D3P's producers' own analysis and their own experiences (or at least, the experiences of those who bothered to even try it). This isn't them trying to sneakily drum up support for a game they think is a hidden gem or slow-burner, either: they're quite frank about why they think nobody cares and why it probably hasn't deserved to sell and may not recover.
I hoped I'd have time to translate this but I really don't, so here's a summary of a few points that caught my eye:
One of Harada's big points is that the game doesn't fit with D3p's existing brand image, nor do a lot of the stated game elements match up to the marketing materials and so on: D3P's known for EDF and other silly, trashy games that aren't necessarily mindless but are certainly immediately approachable, and yet Ed-0 is being promoted as this grim, punishing game that'll grind you into dirt, and none of the promotional arts, game screens, etc really communicate that it's a roguelike so they can't really court that specific niche, either. (I can certainly sympathise: I didn't bother trying this game because it came across as a bunch of in-vogue bullet points thrown into a blender, with none of the endearing traits of Simple-era D3P.)
Matsuyama, being the only one of them who really played it, is primarily surprised that the game spent 15 months in early access and somehow launched in the state that it did—it's not broken or anything but there are a million issues that are evident within the first fifteen minutes that he thinks should have been immediately addressed; he says D3P's staff were hoping he'd come up and be like "this game's secretly pretty good" but he really doesn't think it's up to scratch.
They're also in agreeance about "Ed-0" being a bad name and not intuitive/memorable to JP folk, and Matsuyama seems especially annoyed about the fact that the girl in the promo art, who's positioned as the main player-character, isn't playable until hours in. The one positive thing he highlights is that they took the control scheme from Elden Ring, but Harada's like "you keep talking up this control scheme and yet you immediately complained about how bad everything feels and how you're constantly accidentally throwing things instead of picking them up"
That segues into a discussion about whether spending all that time in early access was ultimately good or bad; Harada says it was bad, with one of his points being that bad games do well all the time based on existing branding, marketing, publisher power etc & their actual quality isn't really a factor, so spending all that time in early access and expecting that to generate interest for them wasn't the right call... in fact, he thinks they would have been better off doing literally nothing before launch and just dropped the game out of nowhere and hoped it built buzz off being a weird new thing. Some of Matsuyama and Hayashi's descriptions of the game make it sound like one of those old mysterious Famicom games where stuff just arbitrarily happens when you hit buttons, and Harada says that description (accurate or not) is the only thing he's heard that makes him really interested to play it.
There's a bunch more marketing/publisher talk and so on that I don't have time to break down... for those who don't know, D3P's a subsidiary of Bandai-Namco and the producer is a former subordinate of Harada's, and he likens going from Bannam to D3P as like stepping into the hyperbolic time chamber and having to work in 10x gravity.
I might as well end off with Ed-0's internal sales figures: for reference, one would expect Japan to account for ~ 10% of global sales.
PS5 (Japanese retail version): 2,480
PS5 (worldwide digital total): 3,315
- Japan: 1,826
- North America: 969
- Europe: 429
- Asia: 21
Xbox (worldwide digital total): 2,831
Steam incl. Early Access (worldwide digital total): 4,487
- Japan: 2,396
- North America: 820
- Europe: 340
- Asia & elsewhere: 931
Total global sales across all platforms: 13,113
