Overall performance of Platinum Games

[Reasonable]

masschamber said:

Reasonable said:

masschamber said:

Reasonable said:

Bruno Muñoz said:

Vanquish terrible figures (a lot less than 50k units in US last month) suggest that Madworld wouldn't have sold a single  more copy if it had been released on any of the HD systems. In fact considering how bad the game was it sold a lot more than it deserved. We can't overlook the fact that MadWorld unlike Bayonetta and Vanquish doesn't have any japanese appeal to inflate a bit its worldwide sales.

I would argue it should be on HD as well simply because it was a risky, untried IP.  It would have sold on the platforms - personally I would have pushed it more as a PSN/XBLA title - enough combined that when added to the Wii totals would have delivered a much more satisfying number.

It wouldn't have sold gangbusters on each, but it 300K per platform seems reasonable which would take it over 1M total with the Wii.

My point is that there is not point being on a single platform unless you are very, very sure it will sell well on that single platform.  Look at Bayonetta.  That was going to be 360 only until Sega insisted on producing a PS3 port, and it goes on to sell more on PS3 despite being inferior.

No third party developer should be on a single platform without some compelling demographic, control scheme or cost justification.  It's just stupid.  I mean look at Alan Wake.  I guess MS might have helped cover the costs but that was an insane title to make exclusive just to a single platform.

Platinum in particular I've found perplexing in their choices of platform, development platform and exclusivity choices.

considering the incredible number of miserable failures of risky untried ip that have failed on the HD twins the wii makes far more sense, games like no more heroes, muramasa and madworld could have made like enslaved, singularity, the saboteur, velvet assassin or the club on the HD twins, in fact give me one instance of a quirky high risk IP has performed well on the HD twins, the only 3  games I can think of that would fill that requiredment are demon's souls, valkryie chronicles and 3d dot game heroes, which are all exclusive to the ps3 anyway, and they all have a lot broader appeal and are of higher quality than madworld, no more heoers or muramusa.

plus wii exclusives make sense as they have significantly different art assets, so  they would have to make either a game that looks like a wii game on the HD twins, or make 2 completely different games,

I'm not saying it should he on HD only - I'm saying that, unless there is a cost issue, putting your game on 1 console vs 3 consoles is just silly.  I'm not knocking the Wii or saying games don't sell on it - I'm knocking making yourself exclusive with no upside I can see.

You don't even have to add a lot of cost by going all HD.  A game like Madworld could have easily been put on PSN/XLBA with only minor tweaking of the assets and I'd be amazed if it didn't easily sell enough to justify the minor porting costs.

so they should have released the game as a 50 retail game on the wii and a 15 dollar arcade download?  they wouldn't have been able to sell a single copy on the wii then and it sends a terrible message about to consumers about the value of their products, why would a consumer buy a retail game on the wii when they know it will be released as a download game for a fraction of the price? look at what happened with NBA jam, it opened to miserable sales, they've stablized since it was moved to a retail release on the twins at the same cost, but honestly why would anyone buy a product when something identical is available for a fraction of the price? saying that releasing on 3 consoles instead of 1 would make sense if all three were identical with identical prices and the cost to produce for 1 instead of 3 was negligible, but releasing 1 at a significantly higher price or with significantly less features is a downright terrible idea,

so again your logic is poor saying just because you can means you should is never sound reasoning, it like and third parties have been sunk on arcade/psn titles Bladekitten was a terrible blunder, dd releases aren't free money, they take time, the content still needs to be ported over

plus look at original content on xbox live and psn games like castle crashers, shadow complex, braid, and so forth aren't of the same production values as a game like madworld regardless of quality, and rereleasing older games is different as there isn't another higher priced market in which sales are canibalized

We're going to have to agree to disagree.  I believe they made a mistake and could easily have seen more sales on most of their games.  For example if they'd actually led with development on Bayonetta and avoided the ruckuss about the port they'd have sold even more on PS3.  If they'd been cross platform on Madworld I'm personally sure they'd have sold more and made more money.

Also, you missunderstand me again.  I'm saying Madworld should have released at the same time on Wii/PS3/360 (perhaps only on PSN/XBLA on the HD consoles) and that Bayonetta should have been developed on PS3 and ported to 360 instead of the other way around.  In both cases, for minimal additional costs I am convinced they would have seen more sales and more profi.

I'm not saying you do it because you should.  I'm saying they didn't make the best choices based on the available historic performance.  Sure, I'm using hindsight, but that's the point of the OP.  Platinum have made poor choices with a number of their games IMHO in terms of platform/development lead and nothing I've seen in this thread gives me any reason to believe I'm wrong.