Marvelous execs take pay cuts instead of layoffs of the lower orders

[mike_intellivision]

MaxwellGT2000 said:

Kenryoku_Maxis said:

mike_intellivision said:
Four Wii games this half year.

One poorly received series (Eldar Saga)
One not yet released out of Japan (Arc)
One niche (Muramasa)
One bungled cover art (LKS).

That sums up the problems on the Wii.

Mike from Morgantown

People need to stop blaming the sales of games based on excuses such as a game being 'niche' or 'bungled Cover Art'.  Muramasa falls under the same genre as Metroid and Castlevania, its not niche.  And the concept art for Little Kings Story is no different or obscure than something such as Katamari Damacy or Disgaea.  The simple reason these games didn't sell is because they didn't have good marketing (IE: any aside from limited online advertising) and were poorly distributed (were only available in limited venues such as Game Stop and certain department stores, but not found in most Best Buys, Wal Marts, Toys r Us, etc).

The simple fact is, hardly anyone is buying Marvelous games because hardly anyone knows about them.  Not because of things like 'niche genre' or 'bad cover art'.

This is very true, they don't get their money directly from consumers they get their money from retailers and retailers restocking, if you can't convince the retailer that you've got a good game that will sell, they'll buy a couple of copies for each store and be done with it, if you can't even convince them to stock it, then you've got some issues, cause they'll even stock rubbish games in the masses (there was this Christmas Minigame collection on Wii that was recalled due to not a single copy being sold locally and they seriously had 20 copies)

Admittedly my comments were a bit simplistic.  But the "cover art" comment was actually put forth by someone associated with Marvelous, so I do not feel bad about that.

Also, my comments about "niche" and "bungled release" work well with the other comments about people not knowing about these games. A lack of PR and presence leads to a lack of sales. People can't buy what they don't know about or what stores won't stock because people don't know about.  

That being said, those problems, no matter how you describe them, are generally failures at the executive level rather than the programmer level. So the pay reduction by executives is approrpriate.

 

Mike from Morgantown