Why these hardcore games didn't sell.

[snowdog]

I've only read through two and a bit pages of this thread before I got fed up. The difference between a title being a success or failure from the point of view of a publisher is that a title is successful if it's made a profit. It's as simple as that. A successful (ie profitable) title can sell 100,000 units or less if the budget for the title in question is small enough. For some strange reason a great deal of people that've not experienced working in the industry (I worked in the industry for 4 years as a tester working for Eidos until Summer 2008) can't get their heads around this fact, and for some reason get into their heads that if it hasn't sold 1m or more it's a failure. Nonsense.

Going by what the fellah from Namco Bandai said a while back, some PS360 titles need to sell over 500,000 to make a profit. Going by what the fellah from EA said, the cost of developing and publishing Wii titles is anywhere between a third or a quarter more cost effective than developing PS360 titles.

If you take those figures into account you'll find the following ercentage of titles on each platform have been profitable:

Wii games selling 300,000 or more - 246/612 = 40.1%

360 games selling 500,000 or more - 191/858 = 22.3%

PS3 games selling 500,000 or more - 141/528 = 26.7%



Obviously this is taking a fair few assumptions into account, but I don't think I'd be too far wrong if I said that over 50% of Wii titles are successful. They may not all be platinum tites, they may not all be aimed at the 'hardcore' demographic but they are successful.

What's also interesting is taking a look at the amount of platinum titles for the Wii - they're a mixture of different genres aimed at a mixture of different demographics. For my money the Wii is the best console out of the three this gen - it has something that'll appeal to everyone: hardcore games, casual games, puzzle games, survival horror games, party games, music games, action games, adventure games and Homebrew. Something for everyone, no matter how old they are or how long they've been gaming. That's why it's so successful, and why developing and publishing games for it is so successful.

Not every Wii game goes platinum, but the majority of Wii games released earn publishers a profit...and I think third parties are going to learn a valuable lesson from the success of Monster Hunter Tri now that a publisher has finally released a AAA quality game with a AAA quality marketing campaign.