Activision may follow Electronic Arts lead (Wii U)

[Dodece]

hsrob said:

Dodece said:
@hsrob

I would not think it was a matter of expecting miracles. Just a matter of the reality matching realistic expectations on the part of publisher. When a publisher puts out a critically acclaimed title, or one that has a reputation for fairly high sales. They expect even a new platform to mirror that. Obviously it cannot mirror the volume on more established platforms, but they probably expect a roughly similar attach ratio, or actually a greater one given the lack of serious competition.

For Activision a three percent attach ratio for Skylanders, or a six percent attach ratio on Call of Duty. Probably would not have been in their minds when they produced the titles for the platform. They might expect such sales from their properties that were less recognized, or less profitable, but probably not for what would qualify as major franchises. Especially when Call of Duty is the sixth best performing title on the platform.

I honestly think that Activision would have expected to have hit the mark with at least one of those titles. Enough so to at the very least score a ten percent attach ratio, and it probably would be reasonable during any other launch. Except that Nintendo ate up well over half of the software sales. That of coarse brings to light the elephant in the room. The basic it is impossible to beat Nintendo on its console, and it is even foolish to actually try.

Which the numbers are actually bearing out for us. Activision on its very best game is seeing a attach ratio of about a tenth of what Nintendo is seeing with New Super Mario Bros. It wasn't the case being made in the original post, but it is really part of the problem, and should be pointed out. How do you think a good game that isn't Nintendos should perform on the Wii U?

My point though is that any expectation that developers have early in a systems life would have to be relatively soft expectations.  I don't doubt that they hoped that some/one of their games would do better. All it takes though is a Mario Bros. or a Nintendoland to steal your sales, particularly early on when people are short on money after shelling out for a new system.

I also suspect (I have no evidence mind you) that the majority of early console adopters are multi-console owners.  If true it would stand to reason that any third party game that came to the Wii U weeks or months after it was released on other systems would struggle to sell as Wii U owners may have already purchashed these games on other systems. Let's see how games released at the same time do.

Are third parties likely to struggle in this kind of environment, at least initially? Absolutely! But, I expect they knew this before they started and I can't see how anything that has happened so far, which incidentally is still really early in the game, would dissuade them from continuing to try find success.

Third party sales have always been a strange beast on Nintendo systems and while Nintendo always dominates software sales on it's own systems there are ALWAYS a group of third parties that do very well out of the fans who don't want to exclusively play Nintendo games.  I don't think Activision could conclude after three months that they aren't going to be one of those third parties.

It would be very interesting to look at all those games sold by Activision and EA on the Wii and see the number of hits, versus not, and how sales did early in the system's life to give a little more context to the current Wii U software sales.

I know what you mean we used to be able to do that on this site, but doing it by hand using the charts. The most apt correlation being Call of Duty 3. At this point in time during the Wii's lifecycle the game had sold roughly 350,000 units on roughly 4,460,000 consoles sold. Meaning that the game had a attach ratio of roughly eight percent on that console. So not only did that game sell more copies then its current counterpart on the Wii U. It actually sold twenty five percent better to that install base. So on the whole the franchise has obviously declined on the platform, and moving forward in the timeline it comes off even worse, because Call of Duty 3 was still selling over ten thousand units weekly while the Wii U version isn't even reaching three thousand per week.

It stands to reason as of now Activision has not only failed to make money off of the Wii U, but there is a strong possibility that Activision has lost a good amount of money on games for the console. As for another correlation the Xbox 360 was able to sell over a million copies of Call of Duty in its first year while it was really supply constrained. There doesn't seem to be any chance of that happening for the Wii U.