Nintendo Wii owners, it's time to acknowledge third party failures

[Ail]

HappySqurriel said:

Ail said:

HappySqurriel said:

BMaker11 said:

Khuutra said:

BMaker11 said:
It's also time to invalidate the "So what if it didn't sell well, they only need to sell (insert extremely low sales figure) to make profit because Wii development costs are cheap" argument:

http://kotaku.com/5191706/so-how-many-copies-does-a-wii-game-need-to-sell-to-make-money

BMaker, I am going to remember this forever. This post is going to live on in infamy. Do you understand? Forever.

Good. The next time a "big" 3rd party game comes out, and puts out abysmal numbers, and the excuses start flying, remember that link

 

 

Well, if you combine that number with claims from third party publishers like EA that HD console games cost 3 to 4 times as much as Wii games then you have to conclude that games like Little Big Planet, Ratchet and Clank and Killzone 2 are all major flops.

 

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.

 

I seem to recollect articles claiming that the licencing fee on HD consoles are around 10$ for a full price game ( I have no clue if it's a percentage of the retail price or not, I would guess so or you woudn't see brand new games like Legendary retailing at 40$ from day one).

So any idea what the fee is like for a Wii game ?