torok said:
And porting costs money too. I'm not very confident than 10k would pay for Crysis 3. It's a technically advanced game and probably was very expensive, maybe it needs 1.5~2 millions in sales to break even, so porting it would demand more than 100k in sales to be profitable (less than that and it would be better to put that effort in DLCs that can sell in all plataforms and generate revenue). |
NFS probably will be a great game, that's why I plan to buy it. Same with batman, I own it. I don't care for AC though. I was probably a bit harsh here. Point is, many 3rd-party games are really subpar, they often think they come away with horrible bad games. but even for the good ones: nobody forces a Nintendo-fan to buy the games, if he hasn't an interest in them. and for all three games is one thing true: they were all out for PS3 and X360 earlier than for WiiU. That also influences sales naturally. Do we have at this point even one multiplat that was released the same time on WiiU as on other consoles and was not gimped? I can't come up with a name.
To the cost-factor: porting mostly involves programming and (to a bigger degree) testing for specific bugs. The models, the textures, music, leveldesign, overall game direction, general game testing and so on is already done. And that by far exceeds the manpower of programming the game in the first place. Porting involves even less programming, especially if some toolkit/engine is used, as it is standard these days. Early WiiU-games might possibly need more tweaking on the engine, that is true - but that is also a work that can be reused for later releases.
And looking at general gaming-sales: Every budget that needs more than 1 million units to break even is stupid and the risk of losses is extremely high. Most AAA-games should break even on some 100K units. Porting-costs are usually much more smaller (i pointed out the reasons in the previous paragraph). Some 10K sounds reasonable for a port of a AAA-game with some effort put into making it a good port.
