Koei Tecmo has put out a report detailing out the performance of last year and plans for the current year as well as progress against those plans. In that report, it has indicated that the new IP Rise of the Ronin was a ‘priority goal’ for the company, and that the sales start for this have surpassed that of Nioh 1 and Nioh 2 and has seen high valuation by players. The report however, did not put out a number to the sales for Rise of the Ronin.
The report further went to add that working on the title helped significantly increase the development, technology and management capabilities of the company as it was their first AAA class open world RPG. Rise of the Ronin released on Mar 22, 2024 for PS5 and went up against Dragon’s Dogma 2 which also released on the same day across PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC. Rise of the Ronin has received good reviews and currently sits at a score of 76 on Metacritic : The game received praise for its combat and weapon variety; while the overall graphics and the check-list type of open world were pointed out as negatives for the game.
Update: It is telling that we do not have any further updates on the sales numbers for Rise of the Ronin post this. What we have are first week numbers for Japan for PS5 – coming to around 64k units. The game did get a PC launch in early 2025, but did not manage to generate much buzz – the max player count was 12k, a far cry from other games in the genre, or even other games from the developer / publisher. The launch was saddled with optimization issues which took a few patches rolled out subsequently to correct – so much so that Team Ninja had to put out a post specifically addressing issues while porting the game to PC.
The one good thing to come out of this was the launch of Nioh 3 – the learnings and inspirations from the open world experiment of Rise of the Ronin are clearly visible here – but just done better and delivered with better graphics and presentation in the game.
