AAA games are doomed.

[Doobie_wop]

mai said:

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'.

Nintendo Marketing is consistent though, Mario Kart Wii was released in April of 2008 and I'm still seeing ads for it in 2010. The same goes for Wii Fit, Wii Fit Plus, Mario Galaxy etc. What I was trying to say in my first post was that the industry should be looking for a cheaper method of selling games and Nintendo aren't exactly the right people to turn to when it comes to low costs. Companies like Activision, Microsoft, EA and Nintendo can push their games with huge marketing campaigns, but not every publisher or developer have the money to do the same. When a game from the huge publishers isn't pushed, then it ends up like Singularity, Xenoblade, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Alan Wake etc.