mibuokami said:
Perhaps you should look at recent sale trend rather than ineffecient data from when the PS3 was first launched? Pick any none GT/CD game recently release for both the 360 and PS3 from Activision, now compare their sale figure... now tell me if its substantially more profitable to support the 360 exclusively in today's market? |
Bear in mind one thing - even if a game has 35-40% of it's sales on the PS3, doesn't nessecarily mean it was worth porting. Why you say?
Lets use some basic numbers
Lets say a game costs $20m to develop., and sells 1m copies (600k on 360, 400k on PS3)
If it was to release on 360 alone, it would not sell 600k, it would likely pick up half of the PS3's sales, since a large number of gamers have both systems but will buy multiplats for their PS3.
so 1m copies split, or 800k on just the 360 is how the dev may look at things.
Now, that $20m budget shrinks to $17 or $18m developing for just one platform, and simultaneously allows them to create a more polished game on that smaller budget, since it can be focused on one system.
Also, factor in that MS charges less licensing fees for their games, which means those extra 200k sales are at a higher profit margin than 200k sales on a PS3.
in short, in a scenario like this, you get:
Multiplat - $20 dev budget - $50m sales - (Dev takes say... 40% of that all told after publishing and licensing fees) - dev about breaks even
360 Exclusive - $17-18m budget - $40m - (Dev takes about 43% all told after publishing and licensing fees) = 17.2m - dev about breaks even - not including any incentives for making the game exclusive
But the issue is more than that. Not only can the numbers be similar, but there's less overhead. a company can maintain smaller development teams which means less money lost on flops/cancelled projects. It reduces overall administrative costs, which for a company the size of activision can really add up.
Note: none of these numbers are real, just an example of how multiplats(I don't know the exact figures) are not nessecarily more profitable, just because they sell more copies.