Erik Aston said:
Nope. You didn't answer why. You just showed how. How the book about the 2nd best flying ace of WWI didn't sell as well was a bunch of fine points about point-of-purchase marketing, shelf positioning, and percent of sales as a hardcover or softcover, etc., which some of you seem intent on debating. No actually it comes down to a simple fact. People are more interested in the best flying ace of world war one. If 40% of people could name the Red Baron, how many could label the number 2 flying ace? So i'll take it even further, could you name the fourth fastest sprinter in the world? Could you label the 3rd best quarterback in the NFL or the 6th best paid soccer star in the world. The best Shooter of the last generation was Halo 2 - it sold 8 million copies whilst the best selling shooter on the PS2 sold 3.44 million copies despite the huge difference in sales of the two consoles. This gap is due to the fact that the combination of Halo 2 + The Xbox was far superior than Socom + PS2. If the Wiimote was what broke Nintendo into vast untapped markets it was Halo 2 which broke the shooter into the console markets in a big way. That's all good and well. But you didn't do anything to address why. At the core, the 2nd best flying ace book didn't sell as well because it was trying to capitalize on a trend, and HOW the best flying ace book became a hit, instead of WHY. I was talking about the Ace, not the book. Your whole 80/20 rule seems to be just to make a company like Nintendo and a company like EA look the same. They both earn the bulk of their money from a few of their releases. But it's an artificial similarity. Maybe, no matter the business strategy, the bulk of money in creative fields still comes from a few releases. But WHY is Nintendo the one, in particular, who is rolling in profits, while traditional powerhouses like EA are nosediving despite record revenues? 80/20 doesn't address that. Because on their own platform they are the big fish, because there are hundreds of competing offerings and most of them are total crap it makes sense that people would gravitate to a name like "Mario" or "Wii" on the games as a mark of quality. Once you remove Wii Sports/Wii Play you will find that 4 of the next 5 games have Mario in them and remaining one Wii Fit. 35.9 million out of 74.6 million of the million sellers were Mario or 48% of the total. EA on the other hand is competing in a much tougher playing field. They are competing with every other developer to produce games which edge ahead of the competition. Take EA vs Activision on the Xbox 360 in the million seller list. Activision has 3 entries in the list and 2 in the top 10. Total sales: 11.06 million (3.68 avg) . EA has 1 entry in the top 10 and 8 games on the list. Total sales: 12.93 million (1.61 average). So you can see that activision has been much more successful than EA. Especially if you use estimates that indicate a game needs to sell 1 million copes to break even. To figure out WHY, you need to study the business strategies. Certainly, some rhetoric comes from a lack of understanding, or is outright a lie, but that's why Malstrom is so useful. His articles examine all the rhetoric from every player in the industry. Go further and examine the rhetoric coming from Iwata and others at Nintendo, and compare it with rhetoric from other companies, to understand WHY Wii and DS own the industry, while other companies are consolidating and collapsing left and right. Sure I will do that, but do you mind that I start with Microsoft? 80/20 rule, hell, from that chart, it looks to me like Nintendo has well over 100% of the profits coming from the industry. |
Tease.
