Cobretti2 on 15 February 2013
| hsrob said: I don't quite understand this perspective. Who was making money on the PS3 and 360 when their install bases were under 5 million? Think about the numbers because they haven't magically changed for the Wii U, this issue has been the same for many years now, at least since the blow-out in average games budgets since the mid 2000s Certainly early in a system's life there are a always few break-out successes but the vast majority of titles probably don't make much, if any, money. It's the reason why most initial games tend to be quick ports, the numbers simply can't justify large investments early in a system's life. Some of the larger companies can afford to, but they are banking on either being one of the break-out successes or releasing an evergreen title whose sales will grow with the user-base. Some generic numbers: 3 million systems 2-3 games per person 30 launch titles = 200-300000 copies per title (if all titles sell equally) Throw in 3 games that sell 1 million each - ~100-200000 average sales for your remaining games - or more realistically a bunch of games that never pass 100K and a number that sell several hundreds of thousands of copies. I don't know precisely what kind of margins game publishers normally have but with the above numbers you are likely to have a significant number of companies struggling to make profit on even moderate-budget titles. The factors which swing in your favour are higher than usual attach rates, rapidly expanding user-base or fewer launch titles but in the end I don't see how people are expecting software miracles with such a small number of any hardware platform. I would imagine that the games publishers hope for break-out success early in a systems life but I can't see how they would expect it. Given the above my answer is no. You are comparing end of life software sell through with early life sell through. Attach rates increase through a system's life and furthermore your average sales per game will increase as the advent of blockbusters releases (that skew the average) is almost a given with publishers as large as EA and Activision. |
The smarter publishers use the Wii to make budget titles that targeted casual, i.e carnival games. They then used the profits to make bigger budget titles on PS360 when the userbase was small.
