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greenmedic88 on 31 January 2010
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Twistedpixel 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.

I would say @ $20 per full priced title, $100,000 per developer per year, they would need ~5,000 full price sales per developer per year to cover the expenses. So over 20 people thats 5k * 2 * 20 = 200,000 copies. With a rough allocation given to marketing. Every 100,000 copies printed of a console game would cost about $8-10 per copy or about a million per 100,000 to distribute and sell. So next to the development budget, these small titles also must worry about printing the correct number of copies. Printing too many is an expensive exercise.

I suspect what this mean is that small studios which work on online games, see Behemoth for example on Xbox Live can make a lot more money due to stable development and fewer distribution costs. I just find it difficult for anything but a well placed development studio to be able to do physical media distribution on consoles.

Someone already worked out a similar formula to estimate what a given title for a given platform would have to sell in order to break even. It wasn't exactly science, but better than outright guessing.

People are claiming there were a lot more developers involved in the creation of the game which only means more hours went into it, making it an even bigger negative ROI. The only saving grace was the apparent lack of any marketing dollars spent.

I'm increasingly convinced that new developers and small studios would be better off starting with DD games as a first effort to avoid losses on inventory production (particularly overproduction) and disto costs. While you are greatly limiting your potential userbase (vast majority of console game sales are still physical media sold via retail by a landslide), it takes a lot of the risk out of a project, increasing odds of future titles.