naznatips said:
First of all, your analogy has to be one of the worst analogies I've ever seen. Ever. It deserves awards for not being remotely relevant. A working analogy would be two car companies are selling cars. Car company A sells 1 million cars a year at a loss. Car company B sells 500,000 cars a year at a profit. Ten years later, none of those 1 million cars exist anymore, and car company A is out of business. Car company B's 500,000 cars are still selling though, and will continue to do so in the future. As the only car company remaining, they either get the business of company A, or the industry shrinks. Either way their sales are not affected. The investors who invested in car company A went bankrupt, and the company is gone. The investors who invested in car company B made money over a period of time, and are financially stable. That is the current state of the games industry. Also, Sega is a great example... of what's happening to western developers. You want to see what happened to Sega spend a few minutes looking through their financial statements, and look at the sales of their big HD games. There's a reason they aren't making many HD games anymore... @ psrock: Links about Japanese developers not making as good of games or as innovative of games or using technology to its advantage are 100% meaningless. We aren't talking about what they're making, we're talking about if they have a sustainable business model, which they do. |
Yeah, it wasn't made to be completely relevant. It was meant to be vaguely relevant. But if half of your argument is going to be how much my analogy sucked, you could have made it a footnote instead. I could easily argue how poor your analogy is as well. If we're arguing car sales in proportion to software sales, there are a lot more factors involved than just the sales of the car/game. Electronic Arts sells more software than Activision most weeks, but EA is losing tons of money whereas Activision is making tons. A lot of this comes down to the profit being made by each game, not how much the games are selling. If Activision can sell millions of copies of Guitar Hero World Tour, and every version makes them a good profit margin, they're certainly doing better than Rock Band or EA's budget priced games.
Sega didn't find success on the HD platforms. Some of this is bad luck, but a lot of it is a complete failure to understand the demographics of those two systems. The highest selling Sega game on the PS3 is Virtua Fighter 5. While 500k is respectable, it likely wasn't enough for a profit. This is Sega's fault for releasing one of the most Japanese oriented fighters on a platform that is struggling in Japan (though, to be fair, they probably began development before the PS3 launch). The highest selling Sega game on the 360 (not counting the bundled Sega Superstars Tennis) is Sonic the Hedgehog, which sold a million copies (if European sales were updated). Pretty good sales, especialy when Sonic is stronger on Nintendo platforms and the game itself was mediocre. Sega found tons of success on the Gamecube last generation, and that was the weakest system on the market. Condemned 2 sold over a million combined on the HD platforms, which is a great improvement over the first game's sales of .45 million (on the other hand, it was a 360 launch title and the second one had lots of advertising).
