Of course ubi lies.. or someone is lying.. its a piece of shit game! ... be honest now.. most people are smart enough not to buy that stinking piece of crap.

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yo_john117

We have no way of knowing if it sold 470k .... it could be 200k for all we know. VG Chartz's numbers are just guesstimates, sometimes they're accurate, other times we know they can be overtracked or undertracked by hundreds of thousands, even a few million in some cases.

I guess it would all depend on how many copies Ubi shipped then (I'm guessing that data isn't available).

Oh how quickly the fanboys turn on the only western developer showing the Wii U true support. Disgraceful.

Let's think over this for a minute. There was a guy at Nintendo that said that making the Fire Emblem game on 3ds profitable, would need it to sell 250k units. A wii u game would need to sell 750k in comparison. I would say that Fire emblem on 3ds is more of an high budget game than ZombiU (Im not saying it's high budget, just higher than ZombiU).

Say that in this case ZombiU needs a 600k to break even. If Vgchartz is right then we aren't that far behind. Couple that with the online sales and we should be rather close.

Still probably a loss, but not nearly close to a profit?

My guess is it's actual sales are a lot lower than the VGChartz number, maybe more like 300k-350k. It sold basically nothing in Japan, and Europe has been awful for Wii U sales, especially the UK market.

Lets say a $5-6 million budget + $3-5 million spent on marketing = $8-11 million tab all told ... yeah they'd probably be several million short.

Also they shouldn't base the multiplat rayman thingumajig on the fact that this game didn't live up to the expectations. There were loads of people that thought that the game was bad, and in some cases thrash. And the biggest gaming site IGN thought the same.

Still, it has a rather good attach rate, and Rayman is a platformer, that in general sell better than horror games on Nintendo systems.

I'm guessing you meant to say "Fire Emblem on Wii-U" in there, rather than 3DS? :P

1) I don't think we can assume that any Fire Emblem game has a bigger budget than ZombiU, to be honest (don't underestimate the cost of HD development despite how the game may appear.  Just look how many game studios went under despite 'average' sales for their titles).

2) Even if we did assume that, we're working on the assumption that VGChartz figures are right, which they may or may not be.

3) ZombiU was heavily bundled in NA.  We don't know if Ubisoft was taking a lower cut because of this.

4) Fire Emblem is a Nintendo game, which traditionally take a long time to drop in price.  The longer the prices stay high; the more of a cut Nintendo gets from each sale.  The same can't be said about ZombiU, which (as with most third party games), begun to lose value fairly rapidly after release.

Just some things to think about.  Guillemot may have been mis-quoted or he might even be just exaggerating this situation, but we have to jump to a lot of assumptions to shoot down what he's saying.

Either way, I think we can conclude that whether it wasn't close to profitable or even if it made a small profit, it wasn't exactly a finiancial success for Ubisoft.

Like KylieDog says, retailers and pubs have set up deals how to work out revenue per copy depening on the ratio of shipment to actual sales. And if a game ends up in bargain bins it's safe to say, even we hobby analysts can assume, that the average revenue per copy paid to the publisher is lower than average.

Anyway, the 500K number, whats your own guess on how much it shipped? A lot more than 500K?

I don´t think ZombiU is FAR from profitable, could they have lost money ? Yes, but considering that the game had a development time shorter than a year (it was still Killer Freaks from outer Space at E3 2011) and the overall feel to it (unpolished, relatively small game etc.) I don´t think it was the flop the original author of the dubious article wants everyone to believe (as mii-gamer said: there is no direct quote from Mr. Guillemot)