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HappySqurriel on 10 December 2007
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dschumm said:
HappySqurriel said:

Zack and Wiki 2 is not surprising at all ...

I could be wrong, but Zack and Wiki seems like the type of game which would have had a very small development cost (in the $1 to $2 Million range); it was likely developed to experiment with a variety of Wii controls to see what the Wiimote could do. Zack and Wiki has probably already broken even, and will potentially turn a healthy profit when it is released in Europe.

Capcom knows that sequels from a game like this can potentially sell better because word-of mouth advertizement from a dedicated fanbase is a very inexpensive and high quality form of marketing. The 150,000+ people in North America who will end up owning Zack and Wiki are all fairly likely to tell people that it was a great game and they should try Zack and Wiki 2, which can lead to it selling 300,000+ units ...


 Yeah Zack & Wiki was cheap but it is such a solid title I really doubt that 1-2 million title. Maybe Carnival games had a budget like that, but I guess closer to 4 million wiht profitability hitting after the Europe launch.

 

I don't know for sure what it cost, I was mostly just trying to point out that it was inexpensive and that even with its low sales it was likely going to turn a healthy profit ...

(Good) Publishers often make games with no expectations of turning much of a profit in the hopes that they can get lucky (on occasion) and have an unexpected hit; if you release an inexpensive game (say $2 to $4 Million) every year you would expect that in a 10 year period you would have (at least) a couple Million sellers and a couple of IPs that you could count on to produce a healthy profit year after year.

Nintendo is (probably) the King of this strategy being that many of their games have low budgets (compared to most) and their sales are reasonably high so the games always turn a profit. Games like the Mario Sports series are (probably) not that expensive because they reuse a lot of graphical assets and have fairly small areas to populate with these assets, and  yet they sell 500,000+ units every time they're released.