Square Enix’s long-awaited new entry in the Dragon Quest Monsters franchise has been a hit as it has now shipped over one million copies worldwide, this figure also includes digital download sales. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince launched exclusively on the Nintendo Switch family of systems on 1st December and has seen physical copies sell out in Japan. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is available now on the Nintendo eShop and at your favourite retailers.
Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince has shifted over one million copies
That’s poor enough sales for a big franchise like Dragon Quest, regardless if it’s a spin-off. The vast, vast majority of the sales also came from Japan, so it’s been a flop everywhere else. Also, I don’t count “shipped” copies as sold copies.
It’s been sold out in retailers in Japan on and off for a while, but I don’t think folks holding off for a physical copy can really be blamed here. 1 million shipped/sold is fairly rough for a DQ spinoff at this point.
For me, I decided to wait for a price drop after I saw the performance issues. This really needed a bit more polish. Maybe Square was just counting on having Switch 2 hardware at this point to grunt through optimization issues.
I’m holding out for a PC port. I don’t like buying games that are locked into consoles, especially soon to be obsolete ones.