Console Equality

[Ajescent]

RVDondaPC said:

Ajescent said:

@RVDondapc

I admit I'm not a business major so I try to think things in ways I can understand

Way I see the idea of boycotts is this.

I am a small company with a budget of $1mil I'm making a multi game

I split my budget 50/50 for each console

when the dust settles I get 1mil return from 360 owners but only 500k from ps3 folks primarily because the ps3 port was sub par and that only happened because we found it difficult working on the ps3, as a result the ps3 took much more time and effort than I was willing to put in. All this ends up in some people choosing to boycott the product entirely.

Maybe it's just me but when it's time for a sequel, I'm gonna think long and hard about the boycotters, the amount of time, effort and money I had to put into the ps3 version and the sub par result which not only didn't get me much in return but made all my effort effectively worthless.

Fortunately I am. 

What you say has a degree of truth but it is not applicable in this situation, and it wouldn't be applicable in most situations. Only very rarely would a situation arise in which boycotters would be shunned and ignored(assuming they are big enough to have an effect on sales), because like everyone else they are consumers and there is money to be made from them.  A situation where it would be applicable is where the boycott was company specific and the reason for the boycott would be unchangable or to change it would take away other revenue greater than what the change would bring. Say for instance PS3 owners are upset at Sega(could be anyone) for making 360 games and decide to boycott Sega until they stop making 360 games. Well if Sega is making more money on 360 games than they are on PS3 games then they would not make the change and would just simply stop making PS3 games because it is not profitable to make them with the boycott intact and there isn't much they can do about it.  

In this situation the boycott would not be company specific, it's practice specific towards a whole industry. For your argument sake we will assume that the boycott effects the PS3 profitability, where as before hand a PS3 port was profitable but now because of the boycott it is not. Well if there are 10 companies making cheap PS3 ports and they all are making sales of $500,000 on average, but because of this boycott each company decides to stop making the cheap ports. Well that is $5 million dollars annually that gamers are no longer spending on cheap ports and would be dying to spend them on quality ports(seeing as quality was their reason for boycotting). A smart company would see that and realize that if they invest the extra money to make a quality port they would then be the only company grabbing from that pot of $5 million from those consumers. As a result of this, the company would make a lot of money because the demand for quality ports would be there. This would then make other companies follow suit to get their portion of the $5 million. And like with any industry there will be winners and losers and the winners will be those that make the best quality ports(as that is the purchasing criteria from the boycotters). 

Ofcourse none of this would ever happen in real life as the quality of a port is subjective and the information to the consumer is not readily available to even make an educated decision. I am simply using the assumption of perfect information to illustrate the theory behind this. Also you'd have to assume that all companies are aware of this and thus they would not collectively pull out of the market because of the boycott they would simply make better ports. 

 

Couldn't it be argued that the extra money used to improve ps3 versions which doesn't automatically guarantee better return can be added to further a 360 exclusive which is more likely to do better anyway whether or not you choose to add that extra spit and polish or saved for a rainy day? (I'm thinking about Valve here and SE with regards to Last Remnant as things stand)

But yes I agree that the ps3 market is not small enough to be completely ignored as a result most companies will be willing to do better and improve their product.