Analyst: Wii Is 'Fool's Gold' For Game Investors

[famousringo]

Procrastinato said:

Mr Khan said:

If we throw the whole notion of profit out the window, then this article has a point.

That's an interesting point.  Do we actually know the costs of making a game like CoD:WaW, Metroid Prime 3, Tomb Raider: Underworld, or The Conduit on the Wii, or are we just assuming that its in the same "1/4th as much" ballpark that all the shovelware is?  Does the marketing and manufacturing cost 1/4 as much on the Wii as well, and does it garner the same revenue per unit sold?

Takes a lot of work to turn a profit.  Having 5-8x the sales numbers must be a nice place to start.

 

 

Well, I expect CoD: WaW would be pretty cheap if you consider the content to be paid for by the HD development (it gets messy if you want to divvy up the content costs on a multiplatform release). I'm sure it cost something to downscale the textures and port the engine, but I doubt they spent too much on that, since the engine doesn't make much use of the Wii's TEV and the online is less robust than some other Wii games. Ditto for Tomb Raider, except the Crystal engine was already established on Wii for Tomb Raider Anniversary.

All I know about the Conduit's cost is that their dev team was around 30 people a few months ago and their dev cycle is about 18 months. The team size probably peaked higher at some point, so it's hard to know how much labour actually went into The Conduit. Doesn't sound too pricey compared to triple-digit teams working on a dev cycle 50-100% larger, though.