| bdbdbd said: @Groucho: Not that i'd disagree with you about the profit, but it's not that simple still. One of the most important things, when reading something, is to comprehend the context. The context in the announcement is to kill the public misconseption of "3rd parties don't sell on Wii". That's when you can't mix it with revenue or profit, or you'd be spinning it. Therefore we have only two, comparable, correct ways of look at it (in case of time period of lifetime sales), which are: compare number of units sold during the time newer has been on the market and compare number of units sold in a same timeframe since launch. |
I think that, when a 3rd party claims that its software isn't "selling", they tend to mean "selling enough to recoup losses, and eventually profit", almost without exception.
Of course 3rd party software "sells" on the Wii. That's a meaningless question, and Nintendo gave a meaningless, although certainly valid, answer to it (the meaningless question), with their graph. The question is, and that the 3rd party publishers are posing is, "does it sell well enough, such that our investment is worth it?" That's the *real* issue, and neither company wants to address it directly, it seems.
The fact that a zillion copies of a zillion different games are sold is meaningless. Each one of those games needs to sell enough to turn a profit. I'd prefer Nintendo had some meaningful numbers to share, rather than their lame total #s graph.
Let me pose it this way:
Console A has 30M units
Console B has 20M units
Console C has 15M units
...meaningless
Console A sells 150K average software units per title
Console B sells 250K average software units per title
Console C sells 170K average software units per title
Console A titles cost an average of $5M, and gross $6M -- avg $1M profit (+20% return)
Console B titles cost an average of $15M, and gross $15M -- avg breakeven
Console C titles cost an average of $15M, and gross $10M -- avg $5M loss
...and lastly
Console B and C crossplatform titles cost $20M, and gross $25M -- avg $5M profit. (+25% return)
There you have it. The 3rd party standpoint.
