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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - High Voltage is 'pleased' with The Conduit sales

LordTheNightKnight on 16 September 2009

Wait. I'm instead going to tear that stupid claim apart. At 240K sold, with over 300K shipped, the game would have to cost closer to HD levels than Wii levels to lose money. With the experience HVS has with game making, there is no way they would let the costs go out of control like that.

And with them taking most of the costs, publishers had minimal risk, so claiming they were averse because were going to lose money on that game is just dumb. Those developers just refused to give it a chance.

 

EDIT: That's to the guy I was responding to in my last post, not you, noname.



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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bardicverse on 16 September 2009

Must get conduit.



Lurker on 16 September 2009

This is a company that generally makes licensed shovelware crap. Of course they're happy with the sales of this.



noname2200 on 16 September 2009

No problem!



Million on 16 September 2009
the_bloodwalker said:
LordTheNightKnight said:
In actuality, if they lost money and didn't tell us, they would get in legal trouble. Lies like that can be used for things like stock manipulation. Thus the SCE frowns on those.

 

They only are obligued to tell if the lost or win when they present finantial results (quaterly or annually), not in interviews and news articles. They can very well skip the question without any trouble. As long as you don't lie to investors and the IRS, you're fine.

Some companies can consider a win in sales of a product even if they lost money (they got no profit).

Any company that develops games cannot make the mistake that all their games are going to be the best sellers (they can brag to gamers but on on the investors or accounting managers) because they made the game. No, when there are many risk factors, you have to tell the investors or your bosses a much lower expectations in sales, even facing losses in some case scenarios (companies do two to four cases). The difference is that they have a level about how much loss is acceptable. Without these cases I don't think a developer would get a green light.

High Voltage Software knew this from the very begining. Even though they have experience in game developmen uder a tight budget and time frame on licenced titles. They knew they lack the expertise in original, propietary IPs and let alone in the FPS genre to say that The Conduit will become a classic. The company clearly considered the losses and made their expectations accordingly to determine a minimum level from which the game's performance in the market can be considered "good" or a total failure.

One of the reasons that many publishers rejected the idea of publishing the game was because they don't wasn to lose money on Wii games. these pucblishers have loss expectations on PS3 and/or XBox360 projects because they can rely on Wii quick cash-in shovelware games to recover some of that loss. SEGA understood these expectations and became the publisher.

The conduit was not a total failure. a "bomb" in sales like some may think. The fact that SEGA and HVS are both happy means that IF they didn't get a profit, the sales went beyond they moderate or high expectations (I imagine they were very very low for both).

Post of the thread.




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the_bloodwalker on 16 September 2009
LordTheNightKnight said:

Talk about presumptive. And big cash whore developers like Ubisoft and Activision show that is not a true notion.

It depends on the company the level of risrk that have to be taken into account when a game is developed. Big house developers like the internal studios inside Ubisoft, EA and Activision-Blizzard can have different expectations for their projects based on the platforms the games will be. This can explin why they do not promote many Wii versions of multiplatform games and focus on the HD systems.  They do not believe they are going to be bgeart hits so they lower the expectations, and to reduce the risk they can assing "B-Class" developers and cut features to balance the "expected losses". It's a vicious cycle, becaus if the game sells poorly they lower expectations, cuts budget and team size and promote the game much less (and it repeats until the developer bullshits).

For new or small developers, it's very hard to find a publisher, an original IP, even for a HD system is a high risk, because there are expectations of a loss (but there are some published that prefer take risks on HS games than for the Wii)

 

 



LordTheNightKnight on 16 September 2009

"Post of the thread."

No, because the post is wrong. The game would have to cost about half as much as a large budget HD game to have lost money with the sales it has.

HVS has had too much experience with making games under budget to do that.



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

Million on 16 September 2009
LordTheNightKnight said:
"Post of the thread."

No, because the post is wrong. The game would have to cost about half as much as a large budget HD game to have lost money with the sales it has.

HVS has had too much experience with making games under budget to do that.

 

I don't think you read properly , he didn't say they made a loss -_-.




marcoberry3 on 16 September 2009

How much did this game cost to develop?



LordTheNightKnight on 16 September 2009

Okay, looking at it again, I see he didn't, but it still had a hell of a lot of assumptions that just dont hold up. As for his reply clarifying his comment, I do agree on that somewhat.



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