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WilliamWatts on 25 February 2010
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jammy2211 said:
WilliamWatts said:
Maybe they just don't wanna risk more on the advertising budget than the game itself? A decent campaign is probably $20-25M and for a DX9 console game spending that much is pretty common but the games also cost that much to make, however if the game costs $10M you're increasing your exposure by about 200% if you include packaging and distribution.

The biggest problem for the Wii and the biggest advantage for the Xbox 360 especially out of the DX9 systems is that advertising on Live is cheap and effective. It can be targetted to the audience and im sure they have all kinds of data on your favourite games/types of games you play so they can say target someone who has played say Oblivion but not Fallout 3 with an advertisement. This is the biggest flaw with the online service on the Wii. They simply don't have the connected numbers.

Pretty much this. Also factor in the fact that a $60 RRP game makes ~$10 more then a $50 at full price for the publisher (or $30 compared to $20) so with a 50% higher profit margin per copy sold it makes more sense to 'up' the marketing in order to sell through more. That's they're justification for spending huge amounts of money on the marketing anyway, makes sense really :/.

 I still think competiting with Nintendo is part of it too though, Nintendo's marketing budget must be out of this world. I can understand no one wanting to spend big bucks trying to compete with Nintendo on that front.

Actually I think the major concern is that the average sale price for Wii software is something like $35. Thats why Microsoft can harp on about having the highest revenue share for third parties. Once you take bill of materials/Nintendos/Retailer/Distribution costs out of the $33 you aren't left with much, so I suspect the justification for no advertising comes from that too.