JWE Sales Predictions

Frontier Developments find themselves in a position that is very unusual for the market. It is one of the only times an independent game developer has grown from creating niche pc games to developing a game with a truly global IP across all platforms (PC, XBOX, PS4).

The only other company which has made a similar transition recently is Warsaw based CD Projekt Red. They created the Witcher franchise which started as an indie rpg with fairly basic gameplay mechanics. Over the following decade, upon the back of support from fans of the series (based on a series of books) they went on the develop The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, which turned out to be one the most successful RPG's of all time, marking a massive increase in game quality and fan base. To see what can happen to share price when a small scale game developer releases a global hit take a look at CDProjekt's share chart below. The Witcher 3 was released in May 2015.

As such the market does not seem to know what to make of Frontier yet. Predictions for unit sales are currently based on the previous years sales of Planet Coaster. Planet Coaster was only released on the PC, and whilst very well received, is still a niche gaming market (Theme Park Simulator, a sub-genre of the "Simulator" genre.)

Comparing Planet Coaster to Jurassic World Evolution is not a valid basis for unit sales predictions, though it is worth noting that aside from delving into extensive research brokers don't have all that more to go on.

Planet Coaster sold 400,000 units within the first month and had sold 1.4 million units as of February 2018. It was released solely on PC, without a global IP and without a free global marketing campaign. Jurassic World Evolution was able to hitch a ride on the marketing of the film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom without paying a penny.

So to the predictions.

Steamspy is a website which provides information gathered from the public Steam network user profiles. Steam is the online client through which PC users pay for and download JWE. Steamspy is still in beta phase so isn't entirely reliable, however it has proven to provide fair estimates for sales in the past.

In order to get to a number of units sold it combs through a sample of user profiles every three days, works out the percentage of users playing any particular game, and then extrapolates a larger "real" number based on this ratio. Much in the same way political surveys are conducted. However this process will have fundamental flaws, the number is refreshed every three days and the previous status is thrown out, and the selection is random so may not provide an accurate representation of the player base.

According to current Steamspy numbers JWE has 418,000 owners. This number was reached within 3 days of the games release on June 12, dropped to around 360,000, and is now back up to over 400,000. The drop shows how depending on the three day cycle it can show a different amount of sales. Steamspy has also said that with fast selling games the system tends to underestimate sales.

Considering this I believe it is highly likely that JWE has already sold 500,000 units on PC alone. That's two weeks after game release. This would mean that sales are more than double that of Planet Coaster so far.

This is only taking the PC version of the game into account. The game has actually seen a better critical reception on PS4 and XBOX over PC. It is currently No.1 and N0.2 in the UK PS4 charts with the Deluxe and Standard versions respectively and has a rating of 4.5/5 compared to the PC's overall steam rating of 7/10.

The best broker forecast, issued by Liberum, has estimated JWE to sell 1.75m units in the first year, compared to Planet Coaster's 1.4 million. This is their prediction for all sales including XBOX and PS4. PC sales alone stand to surpass this number. If sales continue at a similar rate to that of double Planet Coaster then it should sell 2.8 million units in the first year on PC alone.

Comparing PC sales to XBOX and PS4 can be tricky as it is heavily dependant upon a variety of factors including game genre and the success of the port (adaption) from PC to console. If we look back at The Witcher 3, we can have an example.

In it's first year PC took 31%, PS4 48%, XBOX 20% of sales.

Second Year: PC 43%, PS4 42%, XBOX 14%

Third Year: PC 50%, PS4 35%, XBOX 15%

Taking an average over the three years, PC took 41.33%, PS4 and XBOX combined took 58.66%.

Looking at just the first year, if we use the same figures for JWE then PC at 31% = 2,800,000.

2,800,000 / 31 = 90,322.580645161

90,322.580645161 x 68 (ps4+xbox %) = 6,141,935.4834709

So in total JWE, using the same percentages, would sell 8.94 million units in the first year.

If we take another far more conservative scenario and estimate that PC will make up 70% of all sales.

2,800,000 / 70 = 40,000

40,000 x 30 = 1,200,000

2,800,000 + 1,200,000 = 4 million units.

This gets us 4 million units sold in first year. This is still 2.25 million more than the best broker forecasts so far.

There is another method for estimating PC sales on steam, using the ratios of Sales to Reviews but I shall cover this in a separate article.  

Update

Peel Hunt have just issued an upgrade to sales estimates on the back of the trading update. They have moved their forecast from 1.75m to 2m.