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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - ASH: first DS game to hit 256 megs

TWRoO on 03 October 2007

If the N64 carts were barely profitable at all, why were there any 3rd party games at all...i know there were few but if no 3rd party dev could make a decent profit there wouldn't have been any.

by barely profitable at all do you mean for instance that the carts cost for the devs to produce about 1/3rd or retail price ....meaning (adding in development costs) they only made £20 or so profit per game sold....unlike CDROM which costed a miniscule amount of money in comparison.

i would assume you mean that, it's just that the way you wrote it sounds like you mean devs made only a couple of $s/£s per game sold.



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z64dan on 06 October 2007
LordTheNightKnight said:
couchmonkey said:
LordTheNightKnight said:
 

I read the post wrong. However, it is still a weird argument. Games like this are not made for maximum profit. Profit is an issue, but if a developer is so concerned about a game to take even a dollar off the development cost, the game would be a potboiler. Those kinds of games don't have a lot of expensive content in the first place.

Everything is made for maximum profit! If that wasn't the case, publishers wouldn't have cared about the cost difference between carts and CDs in the N64/PSX generation. My point is that, while 2 GB cards might be possible, the extra cost spread over hundreds of thousands of units probably discourages publishers from using them.

I don't know that for sure, I'm just guessing at an answer to the earlier question of why we don't see bigger cards. Millions of dollars _could_ be at stake any time you increase the size of the card.


 The N64 exodus was not about maximum profitability. The N64 carts were barely profitable AT ALL. That is not the same thing as adding one puny dollar to manufacturing costs. The N64 carts cost DOZENS OF TIMES what CDs cost.

 This game has a lot of FMVs, when a bunch of bitmat stills with text could do the job. Wouldn't that add maximum profitability? This is a business, but it's not about pinching pennies, unless you are doing a potboiler. This game is clearly NOT a potboiler.

 Plus your math is suspect. You are assuming the company cares more about $1 per game lost than then the millions more they get from a million selling game.


Any company wants to maximize profitability. It was a simple choice probably. Nintendo probably told them how much it would cost to print 1,000,000 copies of their game at 256megs and they decided they could live with that price.

Most third parties that make DS games realize they DON'T need any extra space, and can usually make the game the way they want it with only 64megs or so.

Obviously this company realized "well this game is going to sell really well, so who cares about a little extra expense on the carts?