MaxwellGT2000 said:
Squilliam said:
On price: Im talking about official price drops rather than special prices or retailer deals. Pachter already spoke of the lower average sale price of Wii titles compared to Xbox 360/PS3 titles which is greater than the 20% difference in the official launch prices from the start of the generation. If you have to hunt around for deals it isn't the same as someone just buying the first one they see. Most people don't shop around, you're just benefiting from price discrimination.
On movies vs games? That tells us nothing, sorry. You penetrate the murky hollywood financial accounting standards and report back to me on the lifecycle revenue of movies vs games. From what I can tell, movies aren't making money apparantly either but for what it is worth the big publishers are in the black.
How would you prove that the data in those pie charts is correct? They are afterall estimates based upon statistical polling techniques amongst others. So long as they are representative to within a few percentage points it really doesn't matter if the Xbox 360 got 46% of revenue or 47 or 45% because the message is the same regardless.
In the end so long as the Xbox 360 and PS3 both have high average unit sales and high margins on average per unit sold it will support a lot of developers. It doesn't matter how much each title costs to make, games like most entertainment mediums tend towards the median being unprofitable with the top few % making the majority of the profits. It doesn't matter whether it is the Wii or the Xbox 360 or the overall entertainment software market, nothing really deviates from this rule. The Wii isn't vastly profitable because development costs are low and the Xbox 360 and PS3 aren't vastly unprofitable because the development costs are high. The market just adjusts to the equilibrium regardless.
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Well for more on the validity of these charts you can do the math like these guys did it really doesn't add up, I'd like them to give more info about where they got their totals. Like VGC says they get their numbers from various retailers and such this guy in gamesurta said they patched things together off of little things that got leaked out there, nothing really solid.
Movies are having a surge of higher sales which often happens during a recession, entertainment typically thrives in those times, that surge hit games as well, but still people are losing their jobs and even some of the biggest publishers like EA are posting losses each quarter. But it just backs up the thought you can have all the revenue if that doesn't outweigh the costs then it's just pointless.
As for price if we're going by flat rates then how could Wii be at a lower % compared to PS3 hardware when it's sold at 200 PS3 mainly at 300 and sold over 2 times the PS3 even at 150 dollars it would have to be a higher revenue percent. If we could get some solid total software numbers by console with total revenue we could check their math on that as well, all of which factors into what prices they used and if their charts are reliable.
It's only logical 
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As for the charts I would say they got more information from NPD than you or I ever will. They often compile such things as the average sales price of games and the average sale price of consoles. Given they are a much more legitimate source it goes without saying that they would be offered much better and more consistant information than we would get from NPD or leakers. Not everything which is leaked is public.
EA posting losses is hard to quantify because their studio structure is murky enough as it stands. What is likely is that they have structural issues within their organisation and they would be losing money whether the times were good or the times were bad. Most likely it would be good for the industry if bad companies like EA were to fall because it would give room for much leaner companies to thrive like for instance Zenimax publishing.
As for the Wii vs PS3 comparison. Well you do have a lot of Wii hardware sold @ $150-200 and much of that with a reasonable discount whilst the PS3 average may be in the ~$330-340 range now due to Move bundles. Like I said earlier they may be out by a few % points but the overall point which was that Wii ~= PS3 seems to hold true.
