GTA 5 Release Date For Wii U, PS4 & Xbox One: What’s The Story?

[Zero999]

Mnementh said:

goodgamesir said:

Wow, with your numbers one can wonder how the hell any company lost money this gen if 100k on a new HD platform is enough to turn a profit for one of the biggest game of the generation. 100K to cover full port into a different platform and architecture, for bug testing, printing, shipping, advertising really? This is an HD platform we are talking about. Nintendo was probably thinking like you about the price of HD gaming and they got cought by surprise by the amount of resources it needed and had to delay so many of their games.

So you want to tell me that Activision hates money and ports Ghosts to WiiU, if not even BLOPS turned a profit. They can't expect  much more sales for Ghosts, maybe 300K. But it works on new technology, that increases the effort needed to port it over to WiiU. So if BLOPS didn't profit, Ghosts will also not. You tell me Eric Hirshberg (CEO of Activision) greenlights this port, if they expect a loss on it? Same with Ubisoft, they port a new Assassins Creed if the old one didn't profit? The userbase of the WiiU did not grow that much, so at least it is risky and brings only a low profit, if the old one was sold at a loss. No sane company would do that. You tell me Activision and Ubisoft can't calculate or love Nintendo so much they are willing to make a loss? No.

You overestimate the costs of a port and probably underestimate the cost needed for producing the graphical assets (models for the world and the characters), the music and the scripting. All things that haven't to be redone on a port. You point to HD, but for programming and testing has HD not much impact, but the initial creation of the art is strongly impacted by HD. Take a look on the ending credits of a modern AAA-game. How many programmers and testers do you see? How many people on the graphical staff, for producing music or sound effects, for story and scripting? You'll see that programming and testing is the smaller part of a modern games budget, and it is the part that is far less affected by HD. So I'm personally not so surprised that Ubisoft said ZombiU (newly made game) was a loss and the ports were pretty easy.

So if you would apply common sense instead of wild assumptions here, you would see that Sega, Capcom, EA, Ubisoft and Activision so far should have profited from the WiiU.

Not so sure on Nintendo though. They do no porting but developed full-fledged exclusives. New games are hit hard on the impacts of the switch to HD (I agree with you on this). But that is all done already for the ports. So I think Nintendo might be currently losing on some games, although they also have some advantages as the platform-holder, so it is hard to say really.

I'd say it will easily cross the 500k mark.