ZombiU Was "Not Even Close" to Profitable, No Plans for a Sequel

[coreyerb]

pezus said:

coreyerb said:

Soundwave said:
I wish people would stop using things like the 460k number on VGChartz as gospel. It's a guesstimate on the website's part, not official numbers, we know things are over-tracked by a large amount all the time.

The actual sell through could be 250k or something, who knows.

If Ubi Soft is saying they didn't come close to making money on the game, I'm inclined to believe them.

The actual number isn't important, just as it doesn't matter that we don't know Ubisoft's actual target sales number.

We know enough to confidently say they misjudged the market for their game and spent too much money on it if 250K-500K-whatever-number wasn't enough to make it profitable. They should've taken it multi-platform the moment they realized not enough Wii U's were owned to allow them to hit a high enough sales figure to turn a profit.

How were they to know WiiU sales would die down almost immediately after launch?

Right, so they proceeded to budget a game with a sales target greater than 500K without any idea of how many consoles would sell. Instead of setting an achievable target (15 percent of early adopters bought their mediocre game) or releasing it on other platforms with exponentially more consoles in the wild.

I guess they better learn to project sales before all these Xbox1/PS4 exclusives come out. No way are those systems going to sell quickly enough to support niche 1 million-selling games like ZombiU in the first six months. I guess it helps those two are coming out simultaneously so they hopefully double sales potential, but let's see how The Crew does, for example. You think that's going to sell enough to early adopters to recoup its astronomical costs?