| pokoko said: The more interesting thing, to me, is that a lot of people are "agreeing" with what he said despite the fact that he said two completely contradictory things. "I don't have a lot of confidence that Orbis will sell well as I don't see it selling to the casual audience," and, "stop investing in low margin areas where you can't compete, like casual games. Focus on the core gamer." So, yeah. Clearly the guy knows what he's talking about. |
I'm not so sure they're contradictory as much as they represent how poorly "casual" is typically defined ...
Games designed for mobile phones, or (some of) the downloadable content for consoles, generally have very small margins and it is difficult for a large company to see a substantial benefit from investing in them. Many third party publishers are bleeding money on their ios/android projects even though they're inexpensive to develop because the small revenue per sale means they need hundreds of thousands or millions of paying customers to break even. For some companies this is still worthwhile because you can use smaller projects to create new teams and (potentially) new IPs; but it is not always the best case for them.
At the same time, games like Just Dance are cheap compared to most other console games, sell at the same price, and see similar sales level to most other console games; and many publishers have seen huge profits from these kinds of titles. I don't have any solid numbers for Just Dance but I suspect it was low budget by Wii standards (probably 25% to 50% of a typical Wii game), Wii games are far cheaper to produce than most HD console games (typically 25% to 50% of HD console games), and it was a multi-million selling title; and I wouldn't be surprised if the 30+ million sales for the Just Dance series was more profitable than any other Ubisoft series in the last generation.
In Sony's current financial shape it would make sense to invest in 8 to 12 "Just Dance" kind of games and cut back on 2 to 3 big budget games because they would probably bring in far more profit overall; certainly, many of the "casual" titles would flop but it is more likely that 2 out of 3 big budget games would flop than 8 of 12 casual games.
