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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - High Voltage CEO mocks notion of selling less than a million is a flop.

LordTheNightKnight on 08 February 2011
kitler53 said:
LordTheNightKnight said:
kitler53 said:
Reggie: Wii Games Must Sell a Million to Make a Profit

That’s a lot of copies, how many have made the cut?

Unfortunately, not that many. In fact, most games typically sell less than 150,000 copies according to a New York Times article, where Nintendo of America’s head honcho Reggie Fils-Aime shared this interesting information. Fils-Aime said “[one million titles] was a lower threshold than for the other consoles,” and to make that number possible “[Nintendo] deliberately did not add high-definition capability to the Wii so games would be cheaper to make.”

According to NPD figures, only 16 titles have sold more than a million copies, and that’s from a list of nearly 500 titles. Of those 16, nine of them are first party, and if you follow the Nintendo Wii even slightly close, you can probably guess the majority of them - Wii Fit, Wii Play, Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros Brawl, etc. The grand king of Wii games is Wii Sports which has sold more than 40 million copies to date worldwide, making it the best selling video game of all time (although it's worth noting that it's a pack-in title in every terriorty outside of Japan).

Wii games sell new for typically $50 USD or less, while PS3 and Xbox360 games are in the neighborhood of $60 USD or less.

source: http://wii.nintendolife.com/news/2009/03/reggie_wii_games_must_sell_a_million_to_make_a_profit


The source article doesn't give a direct quote from Reggie about that, and I believe I saw this before, and Reggie later corrected what he meant, which is closer to what the guy in the OP meant.

i do remember him having a correction statement but honestly that's kind of beside the point. there were dozens of articles sensationalizing this news which is what people are going to remember.  the correction was made but i doubt even 5% of the articles posted the correction.


Regardless, the system is still less costly, while the big developers seem determined to spend more money on games. Even in that NYT article they basically admit that.

Nice to see the smaller developers are instead playing it sensible.



A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.

Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs

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oniyide on 08 February 2011

That makes sense, can we extend this to the HDS too??? Im pretty sure not every HD game cost millions of dollars to make. Im sure Sports Champions didnt come anywhere close to that



darkknightkryta on 08 February 2011

I'm still a bit curious on how a game can cost more than 20 million to make.  I mean Uncharted 2 (Atleast the first game anyways) had a 20 million dollar budget.  Yet God of War 3 had a 55 million dollar budget.  What did they do in God of War that cost them 30 million more? (Note God of War games have always had 50 million plus budgets.)



Torillian on 08 February 2011
Bristow9091 said:
Torillian said:
LordTheNightKnight said:

My two cents: I will also add that there is the hypocracy about complaining that some Wii games were "obviously cheap", yet also "flops" if they don't sell more than a couple hundred thousand. If they are really cheap as some claim, than selling even that little will make a profit.

And some user here insisted that selling half a million copies of TvC was basically a disaster. How much could that game have cost, even on the Wii?


Too many people assume that they can make a general bottomline line for sales that games have to sell, but obviously the truth is far more variable.  Big budget games may require a million sales or more but that doesn't mean that every game requires it.  There are games that sell as little as 80,000 and still get a sequel so obviously not every game needs to be a million seller.

In truth it's very difficult to tell whether or not a game met it's sales expectations because we don't know enough about development costs and how the money from each sale is divided amongst the retailers, publishers, and developers.  All we can do is wait for the company to make an official statement one way or another.

This is true, I mean, look at the Disgaea games, infact, just about every JRPG that isn't associated with Bamco or Square Enix (Bamco may be making a profit, they just don't like the west too much to localize games here)

I was actually citing Atelier Rorona, which only got 80,000 sales by the time it got a sequel in Japan.  But yeah, Disgaea games also never get millsions but continue to get sequels.



...

Viper1 on 08 February 2011
LordTheNightKnight said:
Viper1 said:

Good to hear Eric state what most of us already knew to be true.


This also relates to the lack of budget disclosure. Movie budgets are usually public, so it's easy to see such things. Video game companies seem to want to make games like movies, save for being more public about how games are made and for how much.

The movie industry is so much more mature as a business.  The video game industry may one day get their but it's not looking like it wants to move in that direction any time soon.

 

darkknightkryta said:

I'm still a bit curious on how a game can cost more than 20 million to make.  I mean Uncharted 2 (Atleast the first game anyways) had a 20 million dollar budget.  Yet God of War 3 had a 55 million dollar budget.  What did they do in God of War that cost them 30 million more? (Note God of War games have always had 50 million plus budgets.)


Simple math formula can show you.   Game X has 100 people working on it.  The average salary of those 100 people is $75,000 (this was as of 2010) and they work on the game for 4 years.   100 x $75,000 = $7.5 million.  $7.5 million x 4 years = $30 million.

Now that is incredibly broad and doesn't even touch in minor factors that can increase or decrease this cost but it should give you a better idea how one game can cost so much more to develop than another game.  



The rEVOLution is not being televised

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Galaki on 08 February 2011

The bigger the company gets, the more man-in-middle dipped their money grubbing hands into the cash bucket.



Pre-order limited edition Blue Slime Condoms

darkknightkryta on 08 February 2011
Viper1 said:
LordTheNightKnight said:
Viper1 said:

Good to hear Eric state what most of us already knew to be true.


This also relates to the lack of budget disclosure. Movie budgets are usually public, so it's easy to see such things. Video game companies seem to want to make games like movies, save for being more public about how games are made and for how much.

The movie industry is so much more mature as a business.  The video game industry may one day get their but it's not looking like it wants to move in that direction any time soon.

 

darkknightkryta said:

I'm still a bit curious on how a game can cost more than 20 million to make.  I mean Uncharted 2 (Atleast the first game anyways) had a 20 million dollar budget.  Yet God of War 3 had a 55 million dollar budget.  What did they do in God of War that cost them 30 million more? (Note God of War games have always had 50 million plus budgets.)


Simple math formula can show you.   Game X has 100 people working on it.  The average salary of those 100 people is $75,000 (this was as of 2010) and they work on the game for 4 years.   100 x $75,000 = $7.5 million.  $7.5 million x 4 years = $30 million.

Now that is incredibly broad and doesn't even touch in minor factors that can increase or decrease this cost but it should give you a better idea how one game can cost so much more to develop than another game.  

I had actually forgotten God of War's dev time was longer and accounts for the extra mony, but as your math showed, there's no reason for God of War 3 to have cost more than 40 million with its 4 year dev time (I'm guessing that that 4 years).  Yet it's bloated to 55 million, and they were under budget.



Seece on 08 February 2011

"There are like ten games a year that sell over a million units."

LOL a bit more than that I think ...

Edit - We have 41 skus over 1 mill, this isn't counting Black ops on PS3 and 360, just 1, and this isn't counting combined sales of 1 game on PS360 doing 500k on each platform ... so it's likely over 60/70 games did 1 million last year.



 

Doobie_wop on 08 February 2011

To be fair, I've seen you make accusations that HD games need to sell heaps of copies to survive, mainly because your under the assumption that they all cost $20 million dollars to develop. This trend needs to die as much the Wii flop trend, because they are both innacurate and yet they are continously repeated. 



Bet with Conegamer and AussieGecko that the PS3 will have more exclusives in 2011 than the Wii or 360... or something.

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=3879752

LordTheNightKnight on 08 February 2011
Seece said:

"There are like ten games a year that sell over a million units."

LOL a bit more than that I think ...


He wasn't giving an official number. He was just discussing the rarity.



A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.

Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs