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Slimebeast on 08 August 2009
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Squilliam said:
Slimebeast said:
Squilliam said:

Easy: Its not the games you hear about which kill a publisher, its the games you don't. Whether they sell poorly, don't show up on peoples radar or are cancelled before release. EA Had R+D of 1.3B last year, purely software development costs for example. You can't look at the games which people like to point out as profitable, you have to look at the big picture.

Good argument, if it was true.

Look at the quarterly reports, they dont have the kind of huge variation they should if all of a sudden a 1st month 5 million selling game for $45 per copy was included. It should be reflected not just as a big revenue increase but mainly as a gigantic quarterly profit spike, but it isn't.

How many first month, 5M selling games have there been? Also relative to the total revenue even 5M sales are actually quite small when you have multiple million selling games coming out at the same time. In the case of Halo 3 there was a very obvious spike in revenue for Microsoft for example, but even then next to a division which has over 7B in revenue per year its pretty small in comparison.

 


lol, you had to take MS as an example didn't you? A one-game revenue spike would be hard to detect in a MS quarterly report because their overall revenue even in the Entertainment division is so huge.

You'd have to study a report from a publisher with gaming software revenue only, or at least from a publisher who presents each business segment clearly separate and with transparent revenue figures. Like Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed), Take-Two (GTA4), Konami (MGS4), Capcom (RE5) and possibly Activision (CoD5).