Analysis: First week CoD WaW Wii major flop, Medal of Honor breaks 500k

[Squilliam]

BengaBenga said:

mrstickball said:
...So 450,000 and 360,000 units (Z&W then NMH) are considered major 3rd party successes? I was just using 2 of the better-reviewed games that had sub-par sales on the Wii. If both were successes, what about the PS3/X360 games that had similar reviews (80%+) that managed to sell millions like Dead Rising, or Saints Row?

Could also go with:

Madden 09 (360,000)
de Blob (200,000)
Fifa 09 (190,000)
Geometry Wars: Galaxies (70,000)
Trauma Center: New Blood (150,000 + PAL)

Just for a few of the higher rated 3rd party games in the Wii library that didn't perform too well for sales.

 

Dude, you're really overdoing it now.

Success is determined by a combination of the cost of the game to develop+publish it and its sales.
On average we can say that Wii games are at least 3 times cheaper to produce, so that alone would make Z&W sales compare to a 1.3 million selling HD game in profits. And both Z&W and NMH hardly saw any advertising. Plus these games are niche.

I don't have to tell you that advertising can go into the millions for the high budget HD games. 

For smaller titles which sell slower, Publishing costs are higher per unit total and they make up a larger percentage of the costs in selling these games. Also unless they are following the Hollywood model of spending twice as much to advertise a movie than they actually spent to make it, its doubtful that any of these games would recieve much of a marketing push or at least not enough for anyone to really notice.

Btw the 3:1 general rule really should be left with the other general rules people make like that the Wii doesn't sell third party games etc because it doesn't consider the use of third party engines, variance in actual development expenditure, tools/library production etc. For example, I doubt that the Mirrors Edge was an exceptionally expensive game to develop. The UE3 charges a royalty rather than a fixed cost so its useful to take some of the risk out of development because if the game doesn't sell it doesn't cost much, the game is set in a city and the ultra clean look means theres a less artistic work and more architectural work as in actually designing the layout rather than texturing the buildings etc.