Mummelmann said:
Call of Duty: Ghosts and AC 4 was treated equally on all platforms, yet sold terribly on the Wii U, ZombiU was an exlusive effort and didn't even net Ubi a profit; what would do in their shoes? Keep making expensive exclusive software that fails to profit or keep including a multiplat version of games that sell 100-150k and likely incurr a loss in their end or simply start slowly cutting support and focusing your efforts elsewhere towards a proven audience that actually buys your games? People keep saying Ubi has "poor business sense", forum goers apparently understand more both about game development and game publishing than actual developers and publishers. I'll ask you what I once aske John Lucas; what are the odds that almost every single 3rd party developer and publisher in the world are so horrible at their own trade? First off; not all releases on the Wii U are crappy, half-hearted ports like many seem to suggest, and secondly; Microsoft and Sony have worked hard for 15-20 years towards never putting themselves in the position where they would receive such poor support. |
First Ubi didn't make COD. You mention ZombiU. It sold no worse than Red Steel I or II. Those were both exclusives to Nintendo consoles as well. The difference is that somehow they didn't lose money while selling over 650k copies. Apparently in this day and age you can sell that much and still lose your ass. That isn't the fault of Nintendo though.
AC4 wasn't a great effort. It was just a port from PS3/360. In this day and age the engines and content shouldn't have a big problem scaling. On PC turning all these resolutions and features on or off isn't an entire support team or some massive level of personnel. It is a preferene setting within the app. That said the game still works, still sells fewer copies and DLC and other items are available.
Did you read what I just typed? The PC version of ACIV has sold .37 million copies, and appears to not have any money, online server, DLC or other concerns even with a massive number of hardware configurations to deal with in terms of support.
This stuff should all be easy, scalable and flexible by now. If it isn't and needs to have millions being spent fine tuning and massaging it, that is on the publisher, not Nintendo. Again on the mobile side the prices are a tenth, the support concerns a magnatude of order larger and at all works out.
Consoles were supposed to be the solution to expensive, buggy and time intensive PC's. Put a game in and play without concerns about drive updates, incompatibilty, etc.
Instead the whole industry has become LIKE the PC industry which is expensive and dying on the vine.
That industry is dying because when someone can take an iPad and replicate an app for $10 that used to cost $300 on the PC, and then required a $1000 box with $200 service contract, there wasn't anyway that someone would choose the latter. They choose the former and on top of it the former is a magnatude of order cheaper and easier.
I use Apple as an example but the reality is that you can do just as well with $150 Kindle or some cheap Android tablet. Perhaps the experience is 10-15% better on a console but if the costs are several hundred percent higher then the industry is dead.
The question isn't about Nintendo. The question is why can Ubisoft not make a profit when selling a quarter million copies at $60 a pop. When all they are doing is taking the same content, the same engine and sending it all off to the same places to be burned and packaged in the same packaging with slightly different color paper in the sleeve, why is $15,000,000 not enough to make a dime on that? A team of 5-10 people could easily modify that game engine for WiiU. Even if it took them a year and you paid them $150k each that would be $3 million a most. Nevermind that a team of ten people slaving away for a year should probably get your an entirely new engine, not just modify an existing one.
The numbers for the console industry don't make sense. It's much like cable, YouTube and movies. Every new movie is a blockbuster that cost a quarter billion to make, requires a quarter billion in marketing and most of the time yields a movie that is still a smelly turd. Compare that with Walking Dead which gets by on about $3 million per episode and that means an entire season can cost less than $60 million for hours more of entertainment.
The cost of entertainment is becoming profoundly commoditized. Nintendo isn't the problem there. They are actually doing as well as can be done in my opinion. Supporting a failed model for longer doesn't change the fact it is failed. Microsoft is losing money, Sony is losing money and Nintendo is losing money all while most of them are charging more than ever for the same experience but now with more.... who really knows what to justy the higher costs.
