Kingdom Hearts 3 - Where do you think it's going?

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Legend11 said:

I think it being a PS3 exclusive is out of the question since Sony apparently doesn't moneyhat anymore.

The only way I think it has a chance of appearing on the PS3 is if Microsoft moneyhatted for the game and it was later ported to the PS3. That would require a lot of money on Microsoft's part but I think it would be well worth it since it would help sigificantly in changing the 360's image.

If no money is exchanging hands then it'll probably appear on the Wii since it has a major advantage in the youth demographic that would be attracted to the game.

 

^^This - It's not even really debateable either. 

The thing is that a lot of the folks who discuss this topic look at the question from the gamer/fanboy lens. But this is a business who wants to make money and you have to keep that in mind and examine the business factors involved here.  Looking at the potential market for the game to sell to is an important part of determining a platform...after all they don't want to make a game that is at a high risk of not producing a reasonable ROI.

One of the best ways to asses potential ROI is to look at the pool of potential customers for a given platform. With a sequel like this we can use historical data to tell us how the game performs in each region.  That information is critical to selecting a platform with with regional strengths suited to your games' strongest markets. 

So to get to that we first have this:

	KH Series Sales
	JP	NA	EU	WW
KH	1.24	3.45	0.81	5.50
KH2	1.16	2.06	0.47	3.69
KH:FM	0.55	0.00	0.00	0.55
KH2:FM	0.26	0.00	0.00	0.26
KH: re CoM	0.00	0.20	0.00	0.20
Total	3.21	5.71	1.28	10.20
Market Share	31.47%	55.98%	12.55%	100.00%

As you can see the EU market is rather insignificant for KH series sales compared to JP which itself is small compared to NA.  Thus the platform chosen needs to be strong in NA and have a solid base in JP. The less important EU market is still a factor, but a much smaller one than NA and JP.

Next we look at market share for the prospective hardware platforms:

	Market Share
	JP	NA	EU	WW
PS3	24.28%	16.89%	24.86%	20.97%
Wii	67.90%	47.40%	46.15%	49.38%
360	7.82%	35.71%	28.99%	29.65%

First of all the most important market NA shows the 360 with double the PS3's install base and the Wii with triple the PS3 and +50%  over the 360. Second the JP market is dominated by the Wii with about 2.8 times the PS3's install base and  nearly 9 times the X360's.  Finally in Europe the Wii has an 86% and 59% lead over the PS3 and 360 respectively.

But what does all of this translate into?  The short answer/analogy is we are doing the same thing a store like Walmart is doing when it chooses not to supply extreme cold weather clothing to places like Miami.  We are recognizing that certain markets buy certain products and those historical trends have meaning that shouldn't be ignored.  Similarly certain games do good/bad in certain regions and KH is no exception.

	JP	NA	EU	WW
PS3	0.08	0.09	0.03	0.20
Wii	0.21	0.27	0.06	0.54
360	0.02	0.2	0.04	0.26
	0.31	0.56	0.13	1.00
	Weighted by KH series sales by market.

The regional columns above just represent summary data, while the WW column is the important piece of information here.  To summarize the Wii represents 54% of the available KH market, while the 360 represents 26%, and the PS3 comes in at 20%.  Even combining the two HD consoles the Wii has a 16% advantage over the combined HD total.

In short, the Wii is far and away the most sound choice for an exclusive launch, but a multiplat HD launch is possible (or potentially even a triple platform multiplat title, but that is far less likely).  For the PS3 the recent subpar holiday sales performance combined with the realities of the current hardware market share and global economic situations dictates that this game will not be a PS3 exclusive. It will be Wii exclusive, PS3/360 multi-plat, or Wii/PS3/360 multi-plat, because neither the PS3 or 360 can justify the development cost by themself without quite a bit of that notorious "moneyhatting".

Of course since we're talking about the business factors I'll also point out the lower development costs and time for the Wii which again magnifies it's hardware advantage as it has a large positive impact on the final ROI achieved.

Conclusion: Companies are in business to make money and assuming that a company will go against that grain just because you have some nostalgia of playing a game on a certain brand of hardware is wishful thinking at best.  Furthermore, the idea that your personal vision of how the game should push graphical technologies will somehow trump the natural instinct for profit are also rather naive.  The bottom line in this case is the bottom line.

Not trying to crush anyone's dream but the fact is that the odds of a KH3 PS3 exclusive are pretty slim.

PS - All of this assumes that KH3 even hits a console.  They could always decide to just go DS since it nearly trumps all three consoles combined.

note: All the weighting is doing is representing the importance of a region to KH sales by using historical KH series market data to assess a weighting which is uniformly applied to all three consoles for that region, this is done in each region and the results are tallied in the WW column of that table to represent the weighted marketshare for the purposes of KH sales.