PS3 flops in US (March) - what now?

[jman8]

FishyJoe said:

jman8 said:

FishyJoe said:

jman8 said:

FishyJoe said:
If I'm a third party PS3 developer right now I'm scared. If a game like MotorStorm can't sell decently with no competition, how is any game outside of a select few going to sell in the face of heavy competition?

How is selling 200,000 not decent? That's over 10% of PS3 owners. That also doesn't include European sales where the game has been at the top of the charts. The game also sold pretty "decently" in Japan too. This is just as bad as the myth that PSP owners don't buy games when in fact the attach ratio is exactly the same as the DS (at least in the States).

You said it, it's 10% of PS3 owners which means that it didn't sell many systems if any. A good title will get people excited enough to buy at least some systems. This game was hyped by some to push PS3 sales to 300k. Instead PS3 sales went down 20% calculated on a weekly basis.

You never said anything about Motorstorm selling/or not selling systems in your post. All you said is that 3rd parties are probably scared b/c a good game didn't sell well. Well, the game did sell well, and good third party games will sell equally as well considering the number of PS3 owners are on the rise. The PS3 is basically selling at 360 pace from last year, which means that by Christmas they'll have sold probably about 8 million units. So why should 3rd parties be shitting their pants again? Oh yeah, this doesn't even bring up the fact that a third party could always port their PS3 game to the 360.

I don't think Motorstorm made that much money. Lets say it sells 750k WW. If 20% of retail price is reserved for development, a perfectly reasonable number, that means devlopment got $9 million from sales. The development probably cost that much which means they are close to breaking even. Nobody wants to just break even, they want significant returns on their investment. 

Sony probably pockets more than 20% from retail sales. That's saying that 80% goes to the retailer itself which is ridiculously high. It's probably the game stores that pocket 20% from software sold. Anyway, it's too hard to figure out what the actual percentages are, so it's probably not worth arguing over. But keep in mind that development costs for Motorstorm are spread out across a number of other titles. The Motorstorm engine has already been confirmed to be the basis for the latest PS3 Wipeout game, and most likely there will be a Motorstorm2 within a couple of years that utilizes the same code. Expect to see game engines shared across many games in the years to come. The auto industry is the prime example for cutting huge development costs by sharing key components over many model lines.

 Edit: Is there a convenient way to just quote Fishy's last post rather than quote every exchange both of us have had? It looks kinda silly the way it is right now