Team Ninja’s Nioh has been a great success for Koei Tecmo since it launched earlier this year, with the game receiving rave reviews and doing pretty well in the sales department. We’re coming up on two months since the game originally launched, and now the publisher has shared some pretty impressive facts regarding the game’s sales so far.
Koei Tecmo’s general manager, Yasutomo Watanabe, has revealed that the game is now the company’s most successful game in the west ever. He said that “Nioh has been particularly challenging, as it’s a brand new IP we’ve been working on for years. It utilized all the resources of our company. We received unequivocal support from our western publisher, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Nioh is performing very well so far so we are very happy with it.”
He goes on to say that “This position essentially validates our strategy to expand our brand and user-base in the long term and proves that our titles can reach the highest spots in the charts. With overall positive player feedback and media reception we are very pleased by this result and hope to repeat it in the near future.”
Watanabe then adds how Team Ninja’s openness with fans and desire to utilize their feedback was a very good thing for the game, ultimately resulting in the fantastic product we got. “From a development standpoint, the approach Team Ninja chose yielded very important results, as they essentially included the wider public on development decisions from an early stage with the release of the Alpha demo. Being so open, [as well as] incorporating feedback from the fans certainly helped increase interest in the game and shape players’ expectations.”
Considering Nioh’s long development cycle that originally had the game being announced in the early-to-mid 2000s, the fact that the developer was able to make a game so polished was truly impressive. The developers will also be regularly adding free and paid content to the game, with the game most recently receiving 10 new missions at no charge.
