Reggie says most Wii games can make a profit with under a million sold.

[MaxwellGT2000]

WereKitten said:

LordTheNightKnight said:
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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.

Wow, what a way to make up numbers and spin things to suit your own argument... my head spins reading this.  You say "on average 190M" and set sales at 25M when games like GTA IV haven't even hit 15M MW2 has hit the 17M mark and might be able to hit 25M if it doesn't drop off harder cause of market saturation of said title.  (PC sales for both have been said to be rather weak, mainly because both were pretty terrible ports)

When the marketing budget for MW2 was 200M alone without development costs added in (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/51534/Modern-Warfare-2-Cost-200-Million-Hidden-Game-Modes-Unlocked-On-PC) 

So really you can theoretically make more money if you somehow can achieve such sells on the HD consoles, but they haven't and thats why publishers, developers, and other game companies are hurting.  You low balled the marketing cost, you overshot expected sales by a mile, and then act like 25M is able to happen without the game going down to budget price.

This is utterly absurd, your idea could work if it happened in practice, but it doesn't and nothing this gen has even pulled those kinds of numbers except for Wii games (so far Wii Sports, pack in, and Wii Play, which Mario Kart Wii coming along)... it really baffles me.  

Anyway, you're just flat out wrong on the DLC thing, on Wii you can sell and support DLC, hell every game that sells DLC clearly has it marked on the box, the SD cards have been opened up to developers to take advantage of, if they don't then its their own fault, I know Guitar Hero and Rock Band have and likely benefited from it.