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HappySqurriel on 12 August 2008
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Renar said:
RenegadePhantasm said:

Here's a look at how 3rd party games compare in number of sales on the Wii. For this data I used the top 100 selling games in the US each for the Wii and 360 and separated into 1st party and 3rd party published games. I also took the top 50 selling games on each platform for this week. This graph shows that there haven't been as many 3rd party huge sellers on the Wii. It doesn't take the budget of the game into account, so it is difficult to tell whether or not 3rd parties have found success on the Wii.

 

This was somewhat inspired by this Kotaku article, http://kotaku.com/5034951/heres-that-wii-third-party-sales-proof-you-requested?cpage=3 . Since the Wii has had more games in total released for it, the total 3rd party sales are more than on the other consoles.

Expanding the lower part of the graph (make it semi-log.) would be helpful. 

But I do think it already shows several points, that we basically knew already. 

First, that most Wii games are successful, since they only need about 150K sales (~$7.5M in overall revenue).  With this being just US, most all Wii games look to have achieved that.  Canada would add 10% more, plus any other WW sales.

X360 games should be successful, since on average they seem to run 300K in sales, (~$18M in overall revenue).  Of course they have the higher development costs and post-production cost (advertising), but if cost controls are maintained, they should be okay.  Based on the  losses coming out of a number of  game companies,  unfortunately,  that doesn't seem to be the case.

Finally, it shows the homogeniality of the X360 vs Wii population.  Meaning that good hardcore FPS, say, has a better chance of selling very well on the X360 versus the Wii.  But more quirky games will do okay on the Wii, especially as its console sales grow.

 

Although there are probably many games that are profitable at 150,000 sales, I think a better estimate for a break-even point is probably 250,000 ... It may not be that big of a difference but after retailer profit, licencing fees, and marketing costs a publisher/developer (probably) only makes $20 to $40 per game (depending on the price of the game and other factors) which would mean that 250,000 sales would translate to $5 Million to $10 Million.