Or Kororinpa: Marble Mania. It already has a sequel despite only just over 100k sales between Japan and the US.

Reggie speaks the truth.

Unless Nintendo is taking some serious licensing fees from devs, this has to be inaccurate.

After retail and licensing, a new Wii game brings about $30 to the publisher (who often provide the funding/budget for the dev) Of that, maybe $10 per copy is attributed to manufacturing and advertising. If the publisher funded the game for development, they don't give the developer even a dollar more until they recoup their investment plus make a decent profit. After that, the devs will be given a royalty per copy sold.

So, back on point, the investor (publisher) makes $20/copy. Wii games cost between 5-10 mil to make.
So 500K units * $20/unit = $10 mil. Thus, 500k units need to sell in order for an investor to make back their money.

Now, with an independent dev, they fund and publish their games themselves. Thus, they never have to split profits with anything beyond development/manufacturing/advertisement costs. This is why indie game development is much more appealing (plus getting to keep your IP).

To further the example here, I fund my dev team's current project, Broken Attitude Studios. When all is said and done and the game is released, I'll have invested 50K-100k. We will be selling the game for around $10-$15/copy. So in order for me to recoup my profit, our game needs to sell 5k-10k units. Anything beyond that goes towards funding for our next project.

OK folks. What we have here is an indirect quote. Which means we have a paraphrasing -- and not a retelling -- of what Reggie said.

Given the context and other knowledge (including how badly reporters can mangle things based upon 15 years of personal experience), the reference to "big budget" (aka AAA) titles and the inference of worldwide (and not American/North American) sales was completely missed.

Finally, given that Reggie's title was completely messed up (unless he has been demoted and no one knows about it), you have to wonder about the accuracy of some of the other statements.

Unfortunately, this will be used to talk about how bad the Wii "fails" -- even though the second part of the statement -- "which is less than other consoles" will be completely ignored.


Mike from Morgantown

(There are only 25 2M WW sellers for the Xbox 360 and 11 for the PS3, compared to 20 2M WW sellers for the Wii -- and 47 1M WW sellers (Source: VGC)).

Well that's the long scale used in many non-english speaking countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales (I like wiki )

Only trolls would believe this. NMH2,Korinpa(sp?) & the fact that any company makes games for the Wii proves this is a false statement.

There is no debate here. Neogaf have people making the same stupid arguments.

Or maybe some of you think Suda51 is stupid & wants to throw away more money since NMH didn't lose him enough.

Any reasonable person would know that either Reggie misspoke, or the reporter really messed things up.  Didn't stop Kotaku editor and Nintendo troll Luke Plunkett from being all over the story though!

So, How Many Copies Does A Wii Game Need To Sell To Make Money?

Wow, the fallout from this is going to be echoing around the online journal blags for weeks and weeks.

Here's waiting for the correction.

If all of what Reggie was purported to have said is true, I cannot see why anyone would make games -- especially for the higher-threshold PS3 and Xbox 360.

Mike from Morgantown

And no, I think there is a misstatement/misinterpretation here somewhere.

Looking at the sale of those games featured -- Shaun White, Wii Music, Animal Crossing -- shows that Reggie might have been right. Rememebr, Wii Music has outsold LittleBigPlanet.

Mike from Morgantown