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HappySqurriel on 28 July 2008
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Ail said:
HappySqurriel said:

You're making an amazingly foolish assumption that a smaller game can not be a full fledged game in a major franchise ... Dragon Quest IX and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars will both be a tiny fraction of the cost (probably 5% to 10%) of what a similar game would cost to develop on the HD consoles and yet they will have a massive impact on the value of a company.

Carnivale Games doesn't factor that heavily into Take-Two's stock value at the moment because it hasn't sold that much on the grand scale of things and people are uncertain whether their success is repeatable; if Carnivale Games Minigolf exceeds the sales of Carnivale Games this IP will become far more valueable to their portfolio.

The other foolish assumption you're making is that you believe that known franchises are much more predictable revenue and profit streams than (current) unknown franchises. This industry has seen countless franchises rise to amazing heights only to fall to mediocre lows; consider Sonic the Hedgehog, Tomb Raider, Tony Hawk and several of previous generations' biggest selling games. Grand Theft Auto 4 and Bioshock are only one mistake away from being dramatically less popular games than they currently are; the mistake doesn't even have to be a bad or average game, several series saw massive reductions in popularity based on a bad movie.

 

I never said known franchises coudn't fail.

But known franchises are typically more predictable in generating steady future revenue that unknown IP ( check the list of bestselling games all time, franchises massively dominate it). Especially franchises that have yet to deliver a weak showing...

If there was no uncertaintity at all there woudn't be a stock market at all because we would know in advance exactly how much each company would do as future revenue...

 

But you did imply that a large franchise could not be used to develop smaller games, and you implied that it was a better idea to spend more money developing a large budget known franchise than taking that money and using it to develop several smaller (known or unknown) games ...

The important question is this:

Do you think that it will be better for Square Enix on the whole to have develop Final Fantasy XIII for the HD consoles, or would they have been better off taking the same money and developing Final Fantasy XIII, Dragon Quest IX, a new Crono Trigger Game, and Kingdom Hearts for the Nintendo DS and Wii?

In terms of investment is it better to have released 1 big-budget game in a well known franchise, or 4 smaller budget games in a well known franchise?

At the same time, being that gross revenues for one of these games will be similar regardless of the platform it is released upon, doesn't it make sense to lower the development cost on your large franchise games and work on improving the profile of smaller games (and developing new games) so you're less dependant on a particular IP?