NIS America took a gamble last year in localizing both games in the Danganropa series for Western audiences, but their effort seems to have paid off, according to Takuro Yamashita, the company’s CEO.
“Combined sales of the first two Danganronpa titles – Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair – now total more than 200,000 across Europe and the US,” Yamashita recently said. “That’s just on PS Vita – it’s quite an impressive number.”
While the numbers may seem insignificant to the millions of copies high profile AAA titles sell, they’re still quite solid, especially considering that Danganronpa is more of a niche series and the fact that the Vita has definitely not seen the same amount of hardware sales as most other current consoles.
NIS America is already working on a localization of the spinoff title Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls for release this fall and the positive consumer response has even resulted in a shifting of NIS America’s priorities, as Yamashita also stated:
“NISA is known for publishing niche JRPGs like Disgaea, but now we’re shifting the system towards visual novels after the success of Danganronpa.”