Monster Hunter 4 outsold the Vita!

[Cheebee]

badgenome said:

Cheebee said:
Guys, NONE of you are getting a very important point:

a Vita MH4 would've been far less attractive to Capcom because it would've been (much) MORE EXPENSIVE to develop. They would have seen much less profit, even if it had sold the same amount.
I noticed this point is either completely overlooked or severely underestimated.

Even -if- they had made MH4 a Vita exclusive, they would need to sell much more copies to achieve the same profits. Think of the difference between the development budget of AAA Wii and AAA PS360 games. The 3DS-Vita situation would be very comparable, relatively-speaking.

On top of that development would have taken longer, too, so Japan would likely still be waiting (likely well into 2014, too).

That's not even taking into consideration all of Nintendo's bonuses, like publishing the game and whatnot. Clearly it's been a no-brainer for Capcom to go with 3DS over Vita, regardless of intall base.

It has been mentioned, actually, but it's not necessarily the case. It isn't as simple as, "This system is more powerful, therefore this system is much more expensive to develop for." If you spend more time trying to squeeze your game onto a lower spec system, then it can actually be more expensive than developing for a system with higher specs.

If they're creating the assets in HD (to be used later in MH4U for Wii U or something) and then scaling them down, I don't know why it would be significantly cheaper to develop on the 3DS. Or any cheaper, really.

Of course there are exceptions, but I think you're really grasping at straws here. A more powerful system doesn't equal higher dev-costs by default; that depends on the type of game -obviously-. Tetris on Vita would be cheap, and a 3DS GTA would be far more expensive, for example, yes.

Fact remains, a ground-up, full-fledged, AAA, fully-realized MH title the likes of MH4 on Vita would easily have been much more costly to develop than a ground-up 3DS version. One can always come up with 'what ifs', exceptions and best/worst-case scenarios, but in this case that just doesn't fly, no matter how it's spinned.