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Gamerace on 06 January 2010
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Pristine20 said:
Gamerace said:
dampowell said:
at the end of the day. Nintendo will bleed black and the small studios that continue to support the HD systems will bleed red.

Never mind the small studios (their going bankrupt on HD) the big studios are bleeding red on HD.    Only Ubisoft (home of the casualz) and Activision (GH/WoW) are in the black and they are relying heavily on the expanded market to do so.    I think Sega broke even having lost tons on their HD efforts but done well on Wii/DS.  Capcom has a good year too.

At the end of the day 3rd parties will either finally learn the lesson Nintendo is teaching or die in combat for the HD buck.  

Gaming is a business. I'm pretty sure the 3rd parties would be all over the wii if they thought it'll make them the most money but their actions have shown that they don't think so. I'm pretty sure we don't have access to the business dealings that fuel the decisions of these companies so it's bestnot to jump into conclusions. If I remember correctly, there was also a thread on this site a few weeks ago or so about sega lamenting their own losses even after releasing "core" wii games.

Perhaps you could explain the lesson ninty is teaching that 3rd parties need to follow? Is it that everyoe should develop their very own marios because you should know that that's not possible. I may be missing your point there. If you could enlighten me I'd appreciate it.

Look at the top All Time Best Selling titles.   It's vertually all Nintendo with GTA:SA and a GT in there.  All in the double digits of millions.   Nintendo doesn't look to make a game that'll sell a million or two.  They look to make games that will sell 10 to 40 million!!   Wii Music sold almost 4M copies.  It's a flop to Nintendo but EA, Activision, Sony, MS or any other publisher would have hailed it as the next big thing in music games and pimped out sequels and spin-offs and a DS version.     

The only way to get the numbers that Nintendo strives for is to make games that appeal to everyone.  Men, women, and kids.

Fact is even last generation EA was losing money and 3rd parties were crying that they were losing profitability due to ever increasing development costs.   This generation with HD graphics and even more processing power that's a real reality.   They are all losing money on HD games.   Yes, the CoD's and GTA's make profit.  But statically only 20% of all games earn a profit.    With HD development that means huge losses on games that don't and that's 80%!! That's why everyone is dropping new IPs, closing studios and cancelling games.  They are gambling on only making those games they consider sure to be in that 20% win category. Currently as mentioned only Activision and Ubisoft are doing really well and that's because they are major pushers of casual games as well as core.

The lesson is this:   In order to combat high development costs 3rd parties need to stop focusing on selling 1-5m copies and need to raise the bar and ask themselves, how do we sell 10-20m copies?  The answer is by not focusing on the core alone.    Look at movies.   Even most 'guy' action flicks have some romance elements to make it more appealing to women.   Avatar is a movie that appeals equally to both sexes.  But Avatar video games are still made for young males.   The industry needs to grow up and make games for and market to everyone.  Like Nintendo does.