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Doobie_wop said: Nintendo aren't saints when it comes to game costs. Nintendos strategy pretty much relies on making a game for $10 million and then spending $50 million on marketing. If you think that every other developer should follows those guidelines, then it'd only make the games worse, but more well known among the general public. That's better for businesses, but it's worse for gamers. I'd rather games sell on the merits of their qualities than on the size of their marketing campaigns. That's not realistic, but it's obviously what a lot of people in the industry have been relying on. |
IIRC Wii Fit (new IP, new gameplay mechanics, completely new and hardly reachable audience) marketing campaign cost ~$40M (the most expensive Nintendo's marketing campaign ever), while MW2 (old IP, sequel to best-seller, old gameplay mechanics, old and easily reachebale audience) marketing cost $150-160M (overall cost of $200M minus suggested $40-50M to produce). I'm pretty sure Nintendo's marketing as cost saving and efficient as their development, quoting Iwata on that matter: "At the same time, PR efforts with an infinite budget for a marginal increase in sales would be off balance".
Free market is a feedback system, even heavily marketed the game may flop. The best representation of it is ratio of used game sales to new for some meaningful period of time, the higher the number the worse game performs. In other words, games with non-existent legs, which sell most in first week on hype alone, are the ones that sell due to their marketing rather on merits of qualities. Surprisingly enough, Nintendo games usually nothing like that compared to so called 'AAA games'.
