Fils-Aime: 1M Game Sales Required to Make Profit On Wii
- Scribbled on April 10th, 2010 by Jordan Lund
Of the 74 publishers making Wii games only 3 of them had more profitable games than unprofitable ones and one of those is Nintendo.
According to Reggie Fils-Aime, Wii developers need to move 1 million units of any Wii game in order to make a profit. Domestically only 16 Wii titles out of 468 released in the U.S. have hit that milestone.
As I mentioned in my previous article, VGChartz is a little more generous in their global sales totals listing 79 Wii titles which we can now call “profitable” and and 770 which we can call “unprofitable”.
Let’s break it down, shall we? Just 20 publishers have made money on Wii games, that’s out of a grand total of 74 publishers, meaning 54 companies have yet to make any money off Wii development at all.
One of those 20 is Nintendo themselves. Of the 79 profitable Wii games, 23 of them are made by Nintendo. That’s 29.11%, almost 1/3rd of all profitable games. Second place is incredibly distant and is a tie between Electronic Arts and Ubisoft with 8 apiece. Technically EA would edge out Ubi due to an additional 2 titles that fall under “EA Sports” as opposed to Electronic Arts in general. So let’s call that 10 for EA and 8 for Ubi, 12.66% and 10.13% respectively.
Sega is next with 6 titles, 7.59%. Activision, Disney and LucasArts in a 3-way tie with 4 each, 5.06%. Capcom hits the list with 3 games making money, 3.8%. Konami, Majesco, Midway, MTV and Namco gang up with 2 each or 2.53% per company. Rounding out the list with a single profitable game each are 2K, D3, Global Star, Hudson Soft, RedOctane, THQ and Warner Brothers.
Now comes the fun part: let’s look at UNPROFITABLE publishers, those who, according to Nintendo themselves, needed to sell 1 million units each. I’m not going to take you through the complete list of losers on the Wii, it would take too much time. Let’s instead look at the companies who had profitable Wii games and see what cost it took for them to get there.
- Activision made more games for the Wii than any other publisher, 83 games total. 4 of which sold more than a million units and turned a profit.
- Second place is Ubisoft with 66 games. 8 of which made a profit.
- Third place is Electronic Arts with 65 games, 10 of which made a profit.
- THQ – 40 games, 1 profitable.
- Konami – 35 games, 2 profitable.
- Sega – 30 games, 4 profitable.
- Majesco – 24 games, 2 profitable.
- 2K – 22 games, 1 profitable.
- Disney – 18 games, 4 profitable.
- Capcom – 17 games, 3 profitable.
- Namco Bandai – 16 games, 2 profitable.
- D3 – 15 games, 1 profitable.
- Midway – 9 games, 2 profitable.
- MTV – 9 games, 2 profitable.
- Hudson Soft – 9 games, 1 profitable.
- Warner Bros. – 9 games, 1 profitable.
- LucasArts – 8 games, 4 profitable.
There are only THREE developers who had more profitable Wii games than unprofitable ones.
- Nintendo – 35 games, 23 Profitable.
- Global Star and RedOctane – both with one game and both profitable.
So let’s play a game; I like to call it “THINK LIKE A DEVELOPER!”
Your company has made 83 games for a console. Out of those 83 games you lost money on 79 of them. How long do you continue beating your head against the wall? Out of 74 developers, 71 of them had more losing games than winning ones. Of the three profitable companies, one is the console manufacturer and two others have released one game each.
Why on earth would you continue development for such a machine?
