| Mnementh said: 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. |
I agree about how easy a port can be since Wii U is being described as a dev-friendly platform and the extra power makes everything easier when porting from the HD twins. But 100k doesn't looks enough to break even. 100k X US$ 60 is US$ 6 millions and that can't pay a reasonable amount of the bigger games. Despite that, Crysis is probably more focused in being a tech demo to sell Cryengine licenses than necessarily break even, so a Wii U version would show another platform running their engine. It would be nice if someone had some data about porting costs to allow a better analysis on how much it would need to sell.
