Kresnik said:
Why do I never save my old post about profitability of porting to Wii-U? I keep forgetting it comes up time and time again and never keep a bookmark of it.
Anyway, gist of it was using Ubisoft's $1.2m figure of porting to Wii-U (you can search an article on it if you want, I'm a little tired to now) and that breakdown you use in the OP, you need ~ 50,000 copies sold at full price for a game to be profitable when porting to Wii-U.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE.
Ubisoft's figure was an average across all their ported games. That included cheap stuff like Just Dance alongside expensive stuff like Assassin's Creed III. Bigger the game; the more it costs to port.
Another point to consider, as Kitler mentions, is are these titles being sold at full price or not? Is the publisher having to take back a lot of unsold copies? Stuff like that needs factoring in.
Final point I'd make: is it worth it? I'm sure the majority of the ported to Wii-U games are genuinely profitable, apart from stuff like Mass Effect or Need for Speed which, at that development level, probably isn't profitable; and stuff like Splinter Cell or Amazing Spider Man which isn't profitable at any bracket.
For the remaining stuff, were the resources in porting it well spent? Could those resources have been better spent making a different games which would have sold more copies/made more profit elsewhere? In addition, I'm sure stuff like Batman: Arkham City was ported so that the upcoming Arkham Origins had a fanbase on Wii-U when that released. Not every game needs to be profitable on its own if it's part of a more long-term strategy, but is that strategy working?
It's all well and good saying that a game is profitable or not but there's a bit more to it than that, in any case.
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I hope the strategy isn't working for Batman. Origins was a bloody joke compared to the launch port.
But yer I think that is what the developers are trying to do is build an audience however if they don't put in the effort it gives them a bad rep and people wll simply skip the next game. They will need to subsidise Wii U low profits via other platforms, just like they did with the HD twins when Wii you was killing it and they were making casual games (i.e. carnival games) and funneling the profits into HD developement.
Hopeully Watch Dogs will be done right as ubisoft claimed it was being worke don first with the next gen systems. If the game comes out on par i.e. same flawes, same frame rate issues (if any exist) and is critically acclaimed, then there will be no excuse for people to not to buy the game as it is a new IP and technically has no established fanbase anywhere. I think for Ubisoft this will be the last test. After that we may only see just dance games.
