Bandai Namco — by way of social media posts, a PDF shared on their official website, and PR postings — announced that the new video game Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO sold three million copies in its first full 24 hours of release.
The announcement does not specify or go into any further details regarding pre-orders and early access (which technically began back on 08 October 2024, ahead of the game’s formal, wide release on 11 October 2024).
The company attributes the sales success to an international partnership of over 30 offices, with specific marketing initiatives tailored to each territory (including a road tour in North America, and other game events across Europe, South America, and Asia).
Dragon Ball FighterZ (released in January 2018) shipped two million copies worldwide during its first week. As of May 2023, both Dragon Ball XENOVERSE 2 (released October 2016) and Dragon Ball FighterZ had each sold ten million copies. As of this summer, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot (released January 2020) had sold eight million copies.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO released on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (via Steam) 10 October 2024 in Japan, and 11 October 2024 internationally. As opposed to the completely separate Dragon Ball Z (“Budokai”) series developed by Dimps which came before it, the Sparking! series — developed instead by Spike — featured 3D arenas with an over-the-shoulder camera angle. The new game’s title of Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO falls more in line with the original trilogy’s naming scheme in Japanese. The three Sparking! games — the original, NEO!, and METEOR — hit the PlayStation 2 over the course of 2005 to 2007, with the Nintendo Wii also receiving ports of the second and third games. The game series was released numerically under the “Budokai Tenkaichi” moniker internationally. A fourth games — Tag Vs. in Japan; Tenkaichi Tag Team internationally — was released on the PlayStation Portable in 2010. Spike (as Spike Chunsoft) later went on to also develop the crossover fighting games J-Stars Victory VS in 2014 and Jump Force in 2019.