Cursed Mountain developer shut down

[bmmb1]

Demotruk said:

greenmedic88 said:
Hard to say what part of the shortfall has to do with management, but the basic numbers I'm seeing from this example is that 90k units sold with a development team of 20 personnel over (don't know the development time) a presumed 1-2 years is not enough to keep a development studio in business developing for the Wii. Unless they actually started development in 2006, which would go a long way in explaining the shortfall.

Of course one has to take into account that it was a new studio, with no prior releases which meant going through the lengthy process of setting up all resources and libraries using teams that presumably had little or no former experience working together.

The most unfortunate part is that stories like this do not bode well for small studios making attempts to produce unique, smaller niche titles, which means higher odds of seeing low cost party titles and fewer games like Cursed Mountain.

The project was actually a collaboration between a number of small studios. They did a GDC talk about it. So it was much more than those 20 people.

 

I don't think anyone has ever argued that <100,000 sales would be enough for a Wii game, unless it's shovelware or just a very small budget.

Yes, it was apparently much more than 20 people -

"GC 2009: 12 Companies Made Cursed Mountain
To be precise: 236 people and 16 companies across 14 countries and 17 unique locations."

http://wii.ign.com/articles/101/1014390p1.html

I assume all the other companies/people were outsourced to.

 

@SIlver-Tiger:  yes it was advertised a bit in some EU countries, hence the better sales there than in NA (Others with some advertising 70k, NA with no advertising 20k). Just stating the facts, not blaming them, advertising probably wouldn't have put them in the black in this case.