| LordTheNightKnight said: ... Sell better than what? Other GTA games? Or are you claiming no better than SMG? If so, you are going by the same lie that developers are using. They are blaming the audience over their sales and not the lack of mainstream appeal. They make a GTA game that sold so much on the PS2, it will sell on the Wii. And making more money on the HD systems show you are ignoring the increased budgets. |
I think that the point is that the developing costs are not that important with high enough sales volumes or big enough projects.
Take an effort on the scale of a new GTA or MW: about $50-70M to develop it on PS3+360+PC, about $100-150M of marketing and launch expenses. On average let's say that's $190M. Aims to sell about 25M copies between all the platforms, at $60 retail for a return of about $21-23 per sold copy. That will diminsih with time but such a big project would probably be quite front-loaded, so let's say that aims at raking 75%*25M*$22 = about $412M, with a profit of about $222M. Then you have a big infrastructure for DLC and extra profit sources with quite high margins.
Think of the alternative Wii platform: $16-20M for the development of a big project, that means a final total cost of average $143M versus the $190M of the HD+PC version. Game returns more about $15-$18 per sold copy. To rake the same profit ($222M) you would need to sell for $365M/(75%*$17.5) or about 28M copies on Wii alone. Plus the Wii platform doesn't offer the same degree of opportunity for DLC profits.
Really, unless you're developing a game that you expect to resonate with the greatest part of the Wii entire audience, the first option seems a safer financial bet.
