According to Bandai Namco, Dark Souls II, of From Software, has nearly doubled the launch success of From’s second best selling title (a Japan only PSP game) after pumping out over 1.2 million copies since it’s March 11th release date. Dark Souls I, for comparison, only reached that mark 6 months after hitting the shelves. This shows a powerful and growing fanbase, with a solid amount of orders incoming due to the relatively recent release of the PC version on April 24th.
Bandai Namco pumped over one million dollars into marketing Dark Souls II. Lee Kirton, a PR and marketing director for Namco, said that “we really want to push Dark Souls as a franchise whilst looking after our core fans.” With the overwhelming success of the first chapter, it’s easy to see why the decision to pour money into the second was easy to do, and has paid off so far – especially when considering that the other titles were not nearly as promising.
Overall financial status is in question, though.
While overall revenue for Namco Bandai has risen over the last year by 4.2 percent, but profit dropped an astounding 22.6 percent, down to $246.2 million according to GameSpot. With the seemingly dominant focus on the Dark Souls franchise, you have to imagine that they breathed a sigh of relief with the results of the launch of this second installment. However, a 22.6 percent drop in profit has to be extremely alarming, and the company must continue to improve across all fronts this year.
