Grampy said:
Excellent post. noname2200 Thank you. In answer to your question on using projected figures my rationale was this. 2) In the time I've been on this site people seem more often to deal in sales numbers, not revenue 3) I thought numbers were simpler than dealing with relative costs, but you have done a masterful job. 4) I was responding to the constant refrain that NO 3rd party software can do well on the Wii so I mainly wanted to disprove this assumption, not necessarily to do competitive comparisons 5) Probably most important, I'm new and in my naiveté may simply have made the wrong choice. My bad.
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Ah, sorry. Reading back on what I wrote, it sounds more aggressive than I meant it to be. But your reasons are pretty strong, and I'd add another: this site is great for many things, but it can still be off for some games (often by omitting a region entirely). On an unrelated note, thanks for posting all those development cost links in the other thread: they're a bit outdated, but they're also still useful for comparative purposes.
@squillam: I'm not entirely convinced that your comparison is as apple-to-apple as it first seems. In fact, it may be precisely the opposite. HappySqurriel tangentially explained why; each and every one of the new IPs on the 360 and PS3 is a big-budget affair, spearheaded by their respective developers' top talent, with the marketing muscle to support it. By contrast, many of the Wii's third party new IP's are (hitherto) relatively low-budget games, often made by developers' smaller and newer studios. Miyamoto himself has pointed this out in the past.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13373
“If there's only one piece of advice that I could give to the managers of third party companies, it would be that a lot of times it seems that when they're putting games out on Nintendo hardware, those games are being developed by their third-string team or their fourth-string team", said Miyamoto.
The same, obviously, cannot be said of games like Assassin's Creed, or Bioshock, or Mass Effect, or any of the other new IPs the 360 and PS3 currently have. I'd also like to point out that by taking the top ten IPs of the 360 AND the PS3, you're essentially stacking the deck even further; now you're putting the Wii's best against the HD consoles' combined best. I don't think I need to point out the flaw in that argument.
Finally, I direct your attention to SuperLloyd's post, especially the part about what it takes to make a game successful. We know for a fact that games on the 360 and PS3 must sell more than their Wii counterparts simply to break even. Ubisoft, for instance, spends two or three times more on their HD games than on their Wii games, and they're more the rule than the exception.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18389
Simply put, most third parties would be perfectly happy if their games sold less than they do on the HD consoles, because even with lower sales, they'll still have higher profits. Sega essentially said just that not too long ago.
http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/05/13/afx5000811.html
"As rebuilding our consumer video game business is crucial, we now need to review our game title strategy more flexibly to adapt ourselves to changes in the trend of the market" Ueda said, referring to Sega's release of more game titles than competitors to the PS3, which lagged sharply behind (the) Wii in terms of sales.
This effect can be seen even more dramatically in EA. I posted EA's revenue shares earlier in this thread. Note how high their HD sales are. Note also the information that we know about the difference between the Wii's and the HD consoles' development costs. And then finally, read this article.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/24602976
"The company reported a $94 million loss for the quarter, or 34 cents per share, compared to a $25 million loss, or 8 cents per share, a year ago. Net revenue, however, was up 84 percent to $1.13 billion...Analysts had expected the company to break even on revenue of $834.8 million. Though sales increased at a brisk pace, the larger year-over-year loss indicate that the company has yet to truly firm up its bottom line."
Essentially, what we see here is that even when revenues are rising, profits are diminishing because of the insanely high development costs on the HD consoles. And of course it's profit, not revenue, that a company needs simply to survive. So if the HD consoles' development costs are starting to hurt the behemoth that is EA, what do you think it's doing to all the smaller fry? Actually, I can answer that.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6189861.html?sid=6189861
"Since January, a host of development studios have closed their doors, suspended operations, or otherwise stopped making games...During that same period of time, the industry has racked up phenomenal sales. NPD's retail software-sales data for the US has been up by double-digit percentages for each of the first three months of the year, with growth of 47 percent and 63 percent in February and March, respectively."
They're being priced out, simple as that. But the same doesn't appear to be true of Wii developers, for whom the lower development costs mean they can actually make their games, and realize strong profits...
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18144
http://ir.majescoentertainment.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=286976
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18247
There are more examples out there, if you care to look for them. And, as has been pointed out many times, including several times in this thread, even the original third party IPs on the Wii that are supposed to be embematic of the Wii's failure, No More Heroes and Zak and Wiki, have actually gone on to make their developers money, so much so that Suda 51 wants to make a sequel for his game, and Capcom is rumored to have greenlighted Zak and Wiki 2. I bet Factor 5 wishes they could say that, even if they sold more copies of their game than Grasshopper and Capcom...
So in conclusion, I would actually argue that even if the situation is as lopsided as you think it is (and I don't believe that for a nano-second), third parties appear to be doing better on the Wii than they are on the HD consoles. Their sales and revenue may be slightly lower, but their profits appear to be much, much higher. And at the end of the day, it's profit, not revenue, that keeps a developer afloat.
