Activision threatens to "stop supporting" Sony consoles.

[dunno001]

JEDE3 said:
Ps3 makes profit. Why wouldnt they want more money?

I'm noticing a lot of people saying this. Yes, the PS3 makes profit. But developing for it does not mean more money. I'm going to use a very simplified example, the only thing that matters is the final number- which would be 'money.' :

Take team N. Team N makes the necessary code changes for the PS3, costing $D. And after 1 year, it sells X copies, resulting in net profit of $100,000. Not a shabby amount. Or, team N could be put in charge of changing things for a 360/Wii version. Both of these have lower development costs, so there is a reduction in D. Even with a reduction in X, the final net profit on this new project after a year is $200,000. So, for less financial output (the reduced D), there is more profit generated. And this is the more money that Activision wants. More money for no more cost. If they were to have 5 team 'N's there, this would net Activision an additional $500,000 in a year, just for dropping the PS3.

If you want to look at it another way, I'll set $E to the money spent by team N over some extended time period. $E gets Activision either G games for the PS3, or G+Q games for the 360/Wii. If that Q can offset the a (potential) reduction in sales on G, it is more profitable.

Now I know that someone's going to try to ask about something to the tune of COD. I'm going to simplify numbers and say that it sold 4 million each on the 360 and PS3. (Again, precision is not a mandate here, as I know the numbers are vastly different.) What people are seeing and saying is that Activision would be throwing away 4 million sales by having no PS3 version. This is not true, as it would require exactly 0 people to instead pick the only availiable version (360) and the rest forego the series entirely. I do know that there will be some sales lost, but it will not be to the tune of 4 million. This is, however, where things start to get hazy. We don't know how many sales would be lost, if any are even perceived as lost. I'll use COD on the Wii as an example. CoD:WaW sold about 10 million across the 3 platforms. The Wii performed the worst, so we'll drop it. And this leads to sales of CoD4 being... wait... almost 12 million?? We lost no sales by dropping the Wii? What's to say that something like this couldn't be duplicated against the PS3? If they can make the perceived loss to be 0, all the more profit to be seen.