Ail said:
HappySqurriel said:
Ail said:
HappySqurriel said:
Ail said:
HappySqurriel said:
@Megadude
The Wii hasn't past 50% of marketshare but I'm fairly certain that the number of households with Wii systems is greater than the number of households that have a PS3 and/or an XBox 360 ...
Beyond that, even if they don't, why would anyone "with 2 braincells" be able to answer why companies are willing to go bankrupt rather than to produce decent games for 49% of the market when the development costs associated with that 49% of the market is 1/3 to 1/4 the development cost of the other 51% of the market?
Edit: As for the comment on Midway ... You don't need a "Hit" to be a profitable well run company. There are quite a few companies (Majesco for example) who have developed a business model where their development costs are low enough that they can survive off of very low sales.
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Capcom is nowhere near going bankrupt and actually doing very well financially ( the topic of this thread is about Capcom right ?).
Now if you want more shovelware from company like Midway and Eidos , go for it...
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For someone who insults other people about their intelligence you're not particularly bright ...
My comment on this thread was about videogame "Journalists" asking third party publishers why they didn't produce "Hardcore" franchises for the Wii rather than write rants about why the Wii didn't have these games. Very few of the large western publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Take Two, Midway, etc.) are particularly healthy, and yet no one has asked why they choose to ignore the Wii in favour of producing games that (on the whole) do not recover their development costs.
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And once again we get in these discussions...
Companies like EA are huge and what companies like Majesco do can not be applied to them...
EA has to generate billion of $ of revenue just to break even due to its size.
And still most people suggest they should focus on very small cost games that are profitable but don't generate huge amount of revenue.
Do you realize how many 500k selling games EA would have to release every year just to break even due to its size ?
Of course they could always fire 80% of their employees and become Indie but I'm pretty confident not even the shareholders want that.
So EA has to release games that sell a huge amount of copies and so far the HD console is the only medium for this....
This is the model of Activision by the way, a company so successfull it could probably absorb a few of the smaller publishers if it felt like it.........
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I wasn't suggesting that EA duplicate Majesco's business model, but they can learn a lot from it (and EA is one of the few publishers that I think truely "Gets it").
For every HD game that you produce you can easily afford to develop a Wii game at a similar scale, a few lower budget Wii games or PSP games, and a handful of DS games or WiiWare games ... By spreading out your development resources across multiple platforms in multiple genres across a year you minimize the risk associated with development and create much more predictable revenues.
What a lot of third party publishers have done is they have created a few projects for HD consoles at very high development costs, marketed them heavily to (try to) ensure sales, and struggled to turn a profit because one or two of their games falls far short of expectations. In contrast, they have only put their third rate teams to develop games for the Wii with tiny budgets in niche genres ...
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Actually to be honest, none of the huge hyped HD titles at the big publishers this gen have failed to turn a profit( GTA4, MGS4, CoD, Madden, Re5, Assassin Creed). And that part of the strategy seem valid to me.
The title that usually fail to turn a profit are more the middle titles at huge publishers( Midnight Club LA, Mirror Edge,...) or single projects at smaller developers ( Lair, Haze,...)
Publishers with a problem are usually small ones that have banked everything on one HD title, typically trying to create a new franchise at the same time, or publishers that just lack star franchises ( this is the issue of EA which aside from Madden has a lot of medium known titles but no huge megablockbuster).
Heck companies like Capcom and Konami have more blockbusters franchises in their catalog than EA does this gen if you discard Madden...
And I don't think EA gets it. Because instead of trying to develop one very powerfull start franchise they are still going to release a battlefield bad company 2, mirror edge 2, deadspace 2 and co this year so basically sequels to titles you know will sell 1 million units accross HD platforms but sure won't sell the 4 million+ units EA really needs from a couple titles...
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