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Picko said: Squilliam essentially gets things. Malstrom appears to not understand economics, which to someone educated in their area of finance, economics and business makes many of his arguments appear without substance. You guys can find small flaws in Squillian's post because few of us have times to dedicate large posts to these things with all the suitable caveats. Well done on that. Squillian on the oher hand finds flaws in Malstrom's entire methodology, which is fairly significant. Luckily he tells a lot of fanboys what they want to here so none of that will matter to them. But for the record, you should all aspire to be far more knowledgable than Malstrom - because it's not that hard (I promise). |
The problem you face is that you're going up against someone who's been pretty on-the-money the past two years armed with nothing but "he ain't that smart." Surely you can see why you'll have to bring more to the table.
Its well known that nintendo made the majority of their profits from the handheld sector. So if you're taking the whole market into account they probably had closer to 50% market share considering their handheld dominance, or 40% it doesn't matter. Still even then they had the best selling games on their own platform and they made a lot of money from them so how does that even disprove the 80/20 general rule here?
Belike it doesn't. But again, what does the as-yet-unproven 80/20 rule have to do with the topic at hand?
The premise you're attacking is "HD games in general are not sufficiently profitable for most developers and publishers, at least not so much so that most companies can reliably stay in business by focusing on HD games."
The answer, from many different sources, appears to be "no", hence the rash of shut-downs, mergers, etc., but you are claiming that the answer is "yes", with a particular set of companies being used to provide an answer to a general question.
I refer again to my Walmart example. Indeed, Malstrom himself has repeatedly said that select companies can become enormously wealthy in a downmarket, assuming they correctly read the tea leaves and act accordingly. It is telling that of the four examples you listed, one deals primarily in middleware (which the rising HD costs are forcing even the most reluctant of companies, such as Square-Enix, to use), while another gets a ton of its money off digital distribution. The other two are second parties, and I haven't personally seen their individual financial reports (but I have seen those of their owners, and I am not impressed...).
The long and the short of it is that you have yet to support your argument here, and arguing (probably incorrectly) that most revenue goes to a small handful of companies does not disprove a profits argument.
