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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Myth busting; 3rd party games are unprofitable on Wii U

yvanjean on 28 December 2013

Just being profitable isn't enough to get 3rd Party on board, there need to be a nice return on investment. The great thing about porting a game to WiiU is that it can be outsource. The WiiU install base is still too small to really support these ported games but I think that once the install base is 10 million and up these game should turn in a decent profit and you will see more 3rd party games on the WiiU.



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Scisca on 28 December 2013

Don't forget that you're just talking revenue and that you still have to pay a hefty sum of taxes on it! This reduces any possible profit even further.

You know how it goes. Get a team to port a CoD to Wii U to earn a few bucks or have them develop a new DLC for PS360 and PS41 and earn many times more... Yeah...

I know not every game has DLCs selling so good, but this can be a factor. Wii U gamers have to step up, just like Vita gamers, and both have been doing a very bad job recently :(



Wii U is a GCN 2 - I called it months before the release!

My Vita to-buy list: The Walking Dead, Persona 4 Golden, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, TearAway, Ys: Memories of Celceta, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, History: Legends of War, FIFA 13, Final Fantasy HD X, X-2, Worms Revolution Extreme, The Amazing Spiderman, Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate - too many no-gaemz :/

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fatslob-:O on 28 December 2013

You busted essentially nothing.

You don't have any data on average porting costs and what's more is that you make an assumption based off of 1 publisher with out sources to back that up. To make matters worse alot of these 3rd party games sell less than 200K copies consistently. What you just showed is simply revenue, not profit.

Another thing that you didn't cover was exclusive 3rd party games developed for the WII U. Those cases are even worse as evidenced by games such ZombiU and the W101.



episteme on 28 December 2013
Scisca said:

You know how it goes. Get a team to port a CoD to Wii U to earn a few bucks or have them develop a new DLC for PS360 and PS41 and earn many times more... Yeah...


Treyarch has a team for Nintendo ports that also did the Wii ports. I think it's 38 people.

I guess they would be fired without a Wii U port.



eyeofcore on 28 December 2013

fatslob-:O said:
You busted essentially nothing. I wish that was true for your sake...

You don't have any data on average porting costs and what's more is that you make an assumption based off of 1 publisher with out sources to back that up. I have by statements of several publishers that they gave to several websites and it is not only 1 publisher and why I would put sources that you can easily find out by googling. lol

To make matters worse alot of these 3rd party games sell less than 200K copies consistently. That does not mean that there aren't 3rd party games on Wii U and current install base is not huge nor the audience for some of these games is there really then the fact that there were ports that were feature gimped thus it damaged the reputation/trust that 3rd party developers had. In the end shoody ports create distrust towards 3rd party developers...

What you just showed is simply revenue, not profit. I know that, I explained it and I did not said profit, but "profit" and I already discussed that. In the end it is profit once the costs are recouped like development, marketing and production of boxes, copies and other misc. things. If it wasn't profitable then there would't be COD:Ghost nor AC4 on Wii U, nor B:AO nor TASM2(in Spring 14)...

Another thing that you didn't cover was exclusive 3rd party games developed for the WII U. You missed the point of the thread, people can check out and come to conclusion by them self and I wasn't covering games because off topic.

Those cases are even worse as evidenced by games such ZombiU and the W101. Wonderful 101 is developed by 3rd party developer, but it is a franchise owned by Nintendo and funded by Nintendo so it is a 1st party game and new IP which in todays world is a hit or miss. ZombiU was first a game for Wii that had Rabbits and had a different title, then its development was transfered to Xbox 360 and become a game in london involving alien invades in first person view. Then it got transfered to Wii U to be an exclusive and later changed to Zombie Apocalypse theme. So costs of development was higher than it would be if it was a Wii U exclusive from start. ZombiU is not a Triple A game, it had a rather low budget and a relatively small team, I think that right now it grossed 10 million US dollars(don't know if the tax is already accounted, if not then take 10-20% of it) while I assume that the development, marketing, production and misc. things totals it probably at 15 to 20 million US dollars(with tax?).





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episteme on 28 December 2013

I guess not many bought ZombiU at 59,99. I got it with the ZombiU pack.
It was at 15 Euros 6 months ago and it's on the eShop for 9.99 now.



eyeofcore on 28 December 2013
episteme said:
I guess not many bought ZombiU at 59,99. I got it with the ZombiU pack.
It was 6 months ago at 15 Euros and it's on the eShop for 9.99 now.


That sucks... Well you can't expect everything to be "gold" or be profitable, you always have hit and misses.



Mr Puggsly on 28 December 2013

I heard the lack of Wii U support is due to ports being too profitable.



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eyeofcore on 28 December 2013
Mr Puggsly said:
I heard the lack of Wii U support is due to ports being too profitable.


Try harder, BTW nice GIF. lol



fatslob-:O on 28 December 2013

eyeofcore said:

I wish that was true for your sake...

Playing the denial game, eh ? 

eyeofcore said:

 I have by statements of several publishers that they gave to several websites and it is not only 1 publisher and why I would put sources that you can easily find out by googling. lol

Sorry but sources or it didn't happen. BTW pointing to ubisoft alone does not make any conclusions.

eyeofcore said:

That does not mean that there aren't 3rd party games on Wii U and current install base is not huge nor the audience for some of these games is there really then the fact that there were ports that were feature gimped thus it damaged the reputation/trust that 3rd party developers had. In the end shoody ports create distrust towards 3rd party developers...

Did I say that there wasn't any 3rd party games on the WII U ? The current install base isn't huge on the WII U because nintendo gamecube'd themselves LOL. Feature gimping means nothing for the most part if the content of the versions are nearly identical for the most part. 

eyeofcore said:

I know that, I explained it and I did not said profit, but "profit" and I already discussed that. In the end it is profit once the costs are recouped like development, marketing and production of boxes, copies and other misc. things. If it wasn't profitable then there would't be COD:Ghost nor AC4 on Wii U, nor B:AO nor TASM2(in Spring 14)...

How do you know that the costs were recouped ? These publishers didn't say so. Last I heard W101 and ZombiU was a flop.  

eyeofcore said:

You missed the point of the thread, people can check out and come to conclusion by them self and I wasn't covering games because off topic.

Just how exactly is the development of exclusive 3rd party games off topic ? It sounds like you need to brush up your english before posting. I wasn't covering the games themselves, I was bringing up the development issues of exclusive 3rd party games.

eyeofcore said:

Wonderful 101 is developed by 3rd party developer, but it is a franchise owned by Nintendo and funded by Nintendo so it is a 1st party game and new IP which in todays world is a hit or miss. ZombiU was first a game for Wii that had Rabbits and had a different title, then its development was transfered to Xbox 360 and become a game in london involving alien invades in first person view. Then it got transfered to Wii U to be an exclusive and later changed to Zombie Apocalypse theme. So costs of development was higher than it would be if it was a Wii U exclusive from start. ZombiU is not a Triple A game, it had a rather low budget and a relatively small team, I think that right now it grossed 10 million US dollars(don't know if the tax is already accounted, if not then take 10-20% of it) while I assume that the development, marketing, production and misc. things totals it probably at 15 to 20 million US dollars(with tax?).

BTW the W101 is technically a 2nd party game. FYI ZombiU didn't profit.

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/ZombiU-2-Scrapped-By-Ubisoft-First-Game-Didn-t-Make-Profit-57360.html