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ishiki on 06 August 2013
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gigantor21 said:
czecherychestnut said:


Thing to keep in mind I guess is the average selling price of those 3.4 million sales. I noticed tomb raider in oz dropped from full price to half price very quickly (~$89 to $49 in about a month). Now a discount that big isn't retailer, as it was a permanent drop (not a sale). So a lot of those sales would have been at less than full price which obviously pushes the break even point further away. Still, definitely agree that SE should never have expected higher sales than that (particularly on an old reboot) so I think something went very wrong during development which blew the budget, its either that or they suck at market research.

Considering how rudderless and haphazard their handling of their biggest franchise (FF) has been this gen, it doesn't surprise me that they're screwing up on their other IPs from a business standpoint.

It just pisses me off that they put all these unrealistic expectations on their Western IPs to cover their asses over the mess in Japan. And then cited those well reviewed million-sellers as not good enough.

While it's true they had unrealistic expectations. They didn't make as much money off those titles which is still a problem. They need to get the costs of those games down, or the games need to sell more. Shortening dev time for say a Tomb Raider Sequal to 2 years instead of 4, with the same amount of people would greatly improve profitability of those games, and since they have the engine and gameplay template it should be easier to make those like Uncharted, Assasins Creed, ME, etc. They also spent more money on advertising which cut into their profits (Idk the solution to this, maybe smarter advertising campaigns ).

The issue is aside from The FFXIII series, SE games Eidos of otherwise is that their games got delayed and thus increasing costs, Tomb Raider Got delayed a whole Year, Versus got delayed so long it changed its name, FFXIV didn't get delayed but should have causing even more problems. Deus Ex got delayed 6 months. Thief has been in development 5 years.  Who the culprits or combination of culprits responsible for ballooning costs is unknown, but they need (and have though I'm not sure correctly) to do an internal evaluation cutting unnecessary or redundant people and getting procedures more efficient.