| Demotruk said: Odd that you'd use a quote about earnings but fine, I'm sure he's good at estimating costs. That doesn't mean he has actual access to companies costs to demonstrate that the economies of scale for HD games are outweighing the reduced development cost of Wii games, but more importantly nothing that was mentioned in his post, which is where Procrastinato said he would complile the info from, said anything about costs. |
I was actually referring to the average per-unit revenue he stated, not cost-of-goods/cost-of-development. I'd have to use "commonplace" averages for those numbers... like the $20M supposed average HD cost, and the "1/3rd of HD" (or whatnot) cost that people like the EA CEO have mentioned in the past.
I can't make an accurate analysis with data from interwebz averages and VGC, obviously. But there is enough data around to make some good, educated guesses, and discuss the results.
No offense, Demotruk, but I believe there is a lot of "probable fact" to back up my statements. I will try to put in the time, even though other folks (like TheSource), certainly have more skill (and I would think inclination) to do it. I understand that my suppositions put the Wii-gamer-who-wants-core-games-on-the-Wii in a bad position, regarding future releases, at least from Western publishers. I don't mean it as an attack on the Wii (which I adore for the Japanese games), but rather as a serious statement about the "probable" facts behind all the recent publisher outcry about the Wii and their return-on-investments not working out.
The very fact that several big publishers made these statements lends a lot of credibility to the possibility that it might be the truth, doesn't it? I know the idea of it sucks, from the Wii gamer perspective. From the sales and market perspective, however, I think its pretty interesting how the Wii changed the game industry landscape... but mostly only for Nintendo, it seems. That's more than a footnote in gaming industry history -- its a huge statement... thus its fascinating to me.
To embrace it (the Wii), the 3rd parties need to change some strategies, and that also fascinates me. That's the future of a large portion of the industry -- although not all of it, or perhaps even a majority of it, I think its safe to say, at this point.
