Ail said:
That is somewhat attenuated by the fact that HD console games retail for more. I think the consensus is that publisher get around 25$ per HD console game sold once you remove the retailer, distributor, licence fee and such. Seeing how Wii games retail for 10$ less you would expect publisher to only get 17$ or so per Wii game sold ( I'm guessing Licencing fee and distribution are the same, retailers probably get a slightly smaller cut). Which would mean that each HD console game sold generate 1.5 times the money than a Wii game does for a publisher... The game you listed are all 1st or second parties so actually do not have licencing fee too so they probably generated 35$ per copy sold, that is double what a Wii third party generates.... |
Except (of course) that Licencing fees are not the same across consoles ...
I remember seeing an article soon after the launch of the PS3 where a publisher was claiming that, even though the retail price of a PS3/XBox 360 game went up by $10 they were only seeing a couple more dollars per unit than they got on a PS2 game ... At the same time it was rumoured that Nintendo reduced their licencing fee on the Wii (compared to their Gamecube licencing fee which was a couple of dollars more than the PS2's licencing fee) to attract greater third party support.
In other words, it is entirely possible that a publisher only makes a couple of dollars more per game by publishing for a Wii game ...
Anyways, the point of my post was not to get into a realistic argument about the success of those games ... In reality using a 1 Million sales figure works really well for games similar to a lot of the games Nintendo has produced (Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, Mario Kart) but is very inaccruate when you look at a lot of third party games which had a much smaller development budget and a tiny fraction of the marketing budget.
