I have read a couple of articles including this one; http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/04/dragon-quest-x-wii-u-has-weak-launch-at-japanese-retail/, that are calling the launch of dragon quest a bad one based on a two day week. Sales were around 33,000 which is not a great number, but certain websites are calling doom because of the low sales, which again, it only covers two days. These numbers do not take into consideration digital sales neither the reminder of the week; in which I am sure the sales numbers will surpass 200,000 copies easily. It really bothers me, because every Wii U news that comes around journalist are taking it to an extreme, a ridiculous extreme in my opinion. I know the game is not pulling DS numbers, but gaming websites are bashing the game sales way too early to call the game a failure. I am sure sales for this game are going to improve with time and adoption rates, especially when the games hits outside of Japan.
Don't pay attention to the media. They'll say anything to twist the actual "truth".
And besides, the sale rate was 60-80% of the stock. It didn't fail. It just didn't sell in the same way as the previous DQ ones. And it DID boost the sales. Maybe only minimally, but an increase is an increase.
That said, I don't really see this selling 200,000, especially if the shipment was only about 50k or so. But who knows. Maybe the sales are indeed higher on the eShop version. We'll have to wait and see how this goes.
Whether the game sales pick up or not, the real money is in the subscriptions and the digital money. So my guess is that it's already made its money back. Square-Enix will continue to support WiiU, and hopefully not with another MMORPG.
As for this game coming outside of Japan, that isn't a certainty just yet, but if Square-Enix wants to make more money on this, they'll have to bring it stateside. There was also Iwata's declaration to help third-party developers publish their titles stateside. This will probably be one of them.