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Procrastinato on 10 November 2009
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LordTheNightKnight said:
Procrastinato said:

If EA was making a profit on Wii exclusives, relative to 360/PS3 multiplats, I feel certain that they would know it -- being a public company and accountable and all that.

The revenue numbers, thus, tell a story. The revenue on Wii exclusives is the same as PS3 multiplats. Apparently, perhaps even obviously, the money to develop/market/etc. the average Wii exclusive exceeds that of the average multiplat PS3 title's portion of multiplat development.

Every assumption that Wii games are, indeed, made from $5 and a unicorn fart is true -- but unicorns are really quite rare, and getting one to fart for your game apparently costs many millions of dollars, so it works out poorly for the Wii in the end.  EA is asking Nintendo to remove the unicorn fart part of Wii software development for this reason. Maybe allow for pegasi or specially trained Lipizzaners instead.

Jokes aside, Wii development isn't as cheap as the average forum joe likes to think. It is a fair amount cheaper, but not so much so that it can come out the clear winner in today's marketplace, especially when the Wii stands alone (from an architecture perspective), and requires an entire dev team all to itself.  The Wii cannot get out of the demographic scatter issue, or the architectural uniqueness issue.  These are pretty severe problems, in the end.

It started out not a lot less, and while games do cost closer to high end 6th gen games, costs of HD game development has skyrocketed (see the comments about Gran Turismo 5 costing $60 million, and the developers thinking that isn't so much), so Wii development is a lot less by that virtue.

Doesn't it seem to you, by that logic, that EA wouldn't be complaining, though?  Many of the titles EA has published for the Wii have sold in the 200-800K range.  While that's not stellar, and Wii games tend to retail for less overall, wouldn't that support their efforts, and make it worth it to them, if the cost was justified?

Say Wii games make the publisher about $20 (revenue) per copy (which is not unreasonable, considering the retail cut, and a likely large Nintendo cut).  At 500K, thats $10 million USD of justified expense, considering cost-of-goods, marketing, and development costs.

Say PS360 games make the publisher about $30 per copy (again, not unreasonable, since retail and licensing fees are probably similar to Wii titles, as the games take up the same shelf space, etc.), and the dev cost is either split between the PS3 and 360 versions, or the revenue vs expense is counted from both consoles.  

If you peruse the database here, it sure looks like the publishers are having better luck with the latter version than the former.

Since EA is talking about "working with Nintendo" -- perhaps they mean cutting deals with Nintendo, such that, per-unit, the revenue is larger than it currently is, in return for having some fresh new IPs, exclusively for Nintendo platforms?