Metaphor: ReFantazio is a rare breed among AAA game releases in recent years: A wholly original game with a new world, new characters, and new mechanics. JRPGs have had a great year on live streaming, albeit with remakes of entries from classic series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. One might hope that the promise of a new JRPG series would be enough to stir up demand for the game.
However, much of the promotional material for Metaphor: ReFantazio has centered on its similarities to publisher/developer Atlus’ previous series: Shin Megami Tensei and the spin-off Persona games. While this is a sensible marketing decision by Atlus’ parent company Sega, it ignores what makes this new title so different from its publishers’ predecessors.
In this article, we’re looking at how Metaphor: ReFantazio performed on live-streaming platforms, including what is generating such positive word of mouth and how it measures up to Atlus’ previous titles.
Metaphor: ReFantazio Innovates on Persona and Shin Megami Tensei
Metaphor: ReFantazio dazzled players upon its release. In its debut week alone, Metaphor: ReFantazio generated 3.7M hours watched with an airtime of 99K hours. To put this in perspective, the most highly anticipated JRPG of this year – Final Fantasy VII Rebirth – generated 8.4M hours watched. Given that the game is a remake AND a sequel to one of the most popular video games of all time, that makes Metaphor: ReFantazio’s performance fairly impressive. Part of this is due to Sega hyping up the game at Tokyo Game Show 2024, which also drove the title to over 1M copies sold on release day.
Although the audience for JRPGs is smaller than that of soulslikes or Western RPGs, Metaphor: ReFantazio has enchanted the viewers that have tried it out with its grand fantasy storytelling and beautiful visuals. One particularly clever design choice was even covered by The New York Times: Beautifying the menu screens into Da Vinci-style works of art to justify the JRPG genre’s excessive menu navigation time. While the game’s lengthy runtime has helped to push up airtime, the drawn-out tutorial (4-5 hours by many accounts) may have filtered out less hardcore fans. Regardless, streaming is the ideal medium for burning through tutorials quickly and giving viewers access to the meat of the game.
If there’s one subgroup of streamers who are more than happy to commit to lengthy runtimes for Japanese games, it’s VTubers. The most watched Metaphor: ReFantazio streamer was Oozora Subaru with 114K hours watched, with other VTubers like Saintone and Usada Pekora also spending time on the game with 48K and 47K hours watched, respectively. Saintone committed vastly more time to the game with close to 79 hours of airtime so far! The only other top streamer who comes close to this is second place Chinese streamer 餐餐自由配 (blusewilly_retry) with 96K hours watched from an airtime of 34 hours.
Atlus’ Clout as a Developer Pays off With Record Hype for Metaphor: ReFantazio
No doubt a large part of Metaphor: ReFantazio’s success was due to Atlus’ clout as the publisher behind other critically acclaimed JRPGs. Yet Metaphor: ReFantazio’s success was unprecedented, generating 1.7M more hours watched than the next most popular Atlus game Persona 3 Reload at 2M hours watched. This is particularly astounding given that Persona 3 Reload is a remake and therefore should technically have the larger in-built fanbase. This gap might show that viewers are actually more excited for new content than remakes – despite the heavy emphasis on similarities to the Persona franchise in marketing.
However, Persona’s power is still clearly dominant among Atlus’ library of titles. 6 of the top 10 most watched Atlus games on live streaming were Persona games, including a mix of remakes (e.g. Persona 5 Royal) and spin-offs (e.g. Persona 5 Tactica). Although Atlus’ subsidiary group P Studio develops many of these titles, they still trade on Persona’s branding to make their mark. One interesting exception to this trend is Unicorn Overlord – a JRPG published by Atlus but developed by Vanillaware which brought in 564K hours watched. Despite being another original IP with brilliant gameplay, Unicorn Overlord most likely fell short of Metaphor: ReFantazio’s viewership due to its lack of development connection with Persona and its status as a tactical RPG – a more niche subgenre of JRPGs relying heavily on strategy.
Steam Viewership Dominates… But Is This Viewership from Engaged Audiences?
This great success comes with a big caveat: 1.7M hours watched of Metaphor: ReFantazio’s viewership came from Steam – that’s 46.2% of the game’s total viewership. Of that viewership, two channels were primarily responsible: Steam-atlus-jpofficial and ATLUS West, both official channels set up by the developers to showcase the game. In and of itself, that’s not an issue: It might just mean that viewers were interested in seeing the developer’s take on the game or enjoyed the convenience of watching gameplay on the same platform from which they purchased the game.
But, as mentioned in our Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero article, these streams are hosted on the Steam store page. This means that much of this viewership might be incredibly passive, with “viewers” actually being potential buyers who are reading through the store page for reviews, game specs, or DLC details. This makes it hard to determine the viewer’s intent: Are they watching the gameplay to inform their purchasing decision? Or because they have the game already but are interested in watching the stream? Or, worst of all, they’re uninterested in the stream but their time is still being tracked? This issue definitely requires more investigation – keep an eye out for a future blog post detailing whether or not Steam store page viewership is inflating viewing figures.
Regardless, even without Steam viewership Metaphor: ReFantazio has generated enough demand to justify a potential series in the coming years – still being equivalent to Persona 3 Reload. Given Atlus’ penchant for spin-off titles, it seems more likely that we’ll see a spin-off than a sequel in the near future. With such a deep world to build on, more DLC could boost the original game’s viewership in the months to come (such as the already released Costume DLC Packs). Stream Hatchet will be watching Atlus’ next moves.
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