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jammy2211 on 28 January 2009
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Gnizmo said:

jammy2211 said:

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.

 

 What then, do you propose, would justify a sequel? Because the executives think it is a super neat idea? Z&W and Okami were both viewed very favorably by the company and look at where they are now. The game didn't get various sequels and spin-offs by hemoraging money at every turn. The series ultimately started to lose money yes, but thats when it was canned. It makes zero sense for Capcom to make a fighting game based on a failing IP. There is simply no logical explanation.

It's really impossible to say without a solid idea of figures and costs and everything else. Say the first title lost money, I'd say a sequel would be justified if the revenue generated by the first game outweights the expected reduced costs of a sequel, considering you'd expect a smaller dev and marketing budget.

 But we don't know, we've not got anywhere near the figures to even begin to contemplate why Viewtiful Joe had sequels and everything. My gut feeling says it was just CApcom felt if they kept pushing the IP they could get more out of it, eventually, but it didn't work out in the end, neither of us can really say whether that was close to the truth or not, or what any other sequence of events could suggest.

  It'd be great to get more incite into the minds of these companies to be honest, in my opinion most people are too 'generous' with how profitable video games are, but as I say, we need more incite.