Diet Maelstrom: Going Against the Grain, but Less Spite and Smarminess.

[mrstickball]

LordTheNightKnight said:
"Abandoning HD won't make companies any more, or less, smart."

If you read the whole paragraph again, you would see I explicitly said not to do that. My point is to mix up the big and small games among the HD systems and the Wii, not just separate them, where the costs escalate.

May I ask then why you provided 2 points concerning the types of titles to ship, then? You already made that argument as another point of which I did not argue. I am not understanding then why you made the same point twice. I agree that companies need to diversify their portfolio more. But I am not understanding why you say they need to get smarter, talk about HD gaming, then offer no arguement as to how to fix this issue. I was pointing out how they could do it through building gaming engines.

"Your telling me that the system with nearly twice the install base doesn't have an established market?"

I didn't mean "established" in that sense. I meant knowing what games sell best and consistently isn't established.

Ah, but we can look at the top 20 games sold on the Wii and get a very good sense of what sells, and what sells well. Nintendo obviously knows their user base, as they've had immense success. Likewise, EA and Activision have done very well on the Wii with Nintendo-esque titles such as Carnival Games, Guitar Hero, EA Fit Active, and the like. That would provide a pretty good understanding of what sells well on the Wii.

"rgue all you want, but major milked franchises are where companies are making most of their money. GTA keeps 2k afloat, Madden keeps EA afloat, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest keep SE afloat."

GTA isn't milked, as it doesn't release constantly with only some minor changes. And Take-Two (not 2K) lost money when GTA IV came out. So all those profits didn't keep the company afloat. They spent more than the game made.

Could you provide some proof that 2K wound up losing money on a game that sold 10 million copies?

Madden is milked, but EA is still losing money, so it's not keeping them afloat.

Correct, but if you look at the breadth of the EA game portfolio, you should understand 1 franchise can't save a company that releases 50+ games a year, no matter how big it is. We're talking about a company that brings in billions of dollars a year, and Madden is maybe 10% of their portfolio. Even if it was all profit, there's no way it could turn a company which has (again) dozens of titles into the black.