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jammy2211 on 28 January 2009
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NJ5 said:
noname2200 said:
NJ5 said:

@Viper1: So they did a $2 million advertising campaign in Japan?

Let's put that together with Mr. Svensson's other quote:

"Look at publicly listed publisher financials. Industry standard is a variable marketing spend of between 9-12% of forecasted gross sales."

This would point to expectations of around $20 million in Japan in terms of gross sales. So they were expecting 400,000 copies sold in Japan? WTF?

Given this and what narfwack said, I think Mr. Svensson's information is doubtful at best.

That's not too surprising. Remember that the advertising campaign he's alluding to were for the PS2 version, back in '06. Such expectations aren't too outlandish. And Svennson's gone on record several times about the Wii version saying they didn't expect all that much in terms of sales (and that it was selling according to expectations).

I'm also baffled that some people are willing to believe that Viewtiful Joe did not make money.

 

I don't find it that hard to beleive.

 Capcom invested alot into that franchise, but where is it now? Nowhere, because it lost money. If it was profitable we'd have another title in the series, especially with how the Wii is selling at the moment.

 Sequels don't mean the first title made profit, it can just point to strong sales in the first title, but most likely not enough to outweight marketing and dev costs. Every company dreams of having IP's with enough brand recognition to sell big without a huge marketing budget and a game developed from previous middleware, using previous game resources etc, and investing enough money to surpass early losses is part of the parcel.

 While I think Viewtiful Joe sold good sales numbers to justify sequels and keep Capcom investing in it, ultimately it didn't take off how they expected and they had to drop the axe on it eventually.