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coreyerb on 09 July 2013
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fauzman said:
coreyerb said:
fauzman said:
A lot of nintendo fans touted ZombieU as one of the Wii U's key exclusives precisely because of its production values and its hardcore nature (doesnt get much more hardcore than a survival horror) and now a lot seem to be saying they should have made a cheaper game which should have made a profit by now. I mean realistically speaking most retail games nowdays ( and Im not talking AAA) generally need around 1M sales to make a profit so the fact that isnt profitable on the back of weak sales due to weak Wii U sales isnt surprising. I just find it strange that a number of fans seem to be blaming this on the fact that it is a AAA title (in fact I suspect its high sales compared with nintendo IPs is due to its exposure as an exclusive high value 3rd party title) rather than blaming the main culprit - low Wii U sales!!

Budgeting a launch title at the same 1 million sales benchmark as a title five years into the console cycle is ridiculous. Xbox1/PS4 games are going to cost even more to develop. Are we going to hear more stories about games not turning a profit when there aren't 200-plus million consoles sold to support such lofty sales benchmarks?

Launch game exclusives like this should be built to sell sequels - the first game is going to take a loss. Just not enough consoles owned to support good production values (I agree, ZombiU wasn't shoddily programmed, and if it were people would complain about that instead). In a couple years, the sequel will have all the hype from the first one, plus a much greater audience to profit from. Third game even more.

I disagree. I dont see why devs need to take greater risks then they already do and expect a loss in their 1st game particularly if the consoles sells well. I mean sure a number of new IPs dont sell well at launch but some do (Resistance 1 comes to mind). If the game does well critically and is innovative I have no doubt it will sell well. In fact I expect all the sony sequels (KZ:SF and I:SS) to sell more thantheir predecessors (dont know or care about XBO).

Fun with numbers!: Killzone: Shadow Fall edition.

Launch exclusive for PS4, right? Okay, so Killzone 3 sold 2.48 million, let's say there were 40 million PS3s sold when it released in 2011 (offhand no idea how many of the 77.95 PS3s were sold at lower prices since 2011, it's just an estimate). You say KZ:SF will do better than it, so let's double its sales rate. Right, so 2.48M / 40M = 6.2 percent attach rate. All right, KZ:SF nails it, hits 12.4 percent attach rate during launch window.

In order to hit a million sold, even at an unreasonable 12.4 percent attach rate, PS4 will have to sell 8 million consoles. How long will it take to sell that many PS4s? Less than the eight months it took for Ubisoft's CEO to complain about ZombiU's sales? Maybe. What if it only sells as well as KZ3 (more likely)? 16 million consoles necessary to get it to a million, and that's assuming dev costs for PS4 don't raise the profitability benchmark.

That's my point, there are going to be a lot of third-party publishers complaining about not hitting their sales expectations for launch games if they're going to need to break a million sales to break even. Don't make an expensive launch game if you can't afford a loss as a down payment for future sequels.