| czecherychestnut said: I still haven't heard a convincing argument why despite Bayo1 selling 2 million on PS360 and this being insufficient to justify a sequel, why selling 1 million on Wii U (if it even gets that far) will be a 'success' for Nintendo. I mean I know Platinum doesn't care because they've already been paid, but Nintendo will want to make that money back. We're only guessing the breakdown of costs for developing and publishing a game. But Sega had the numbers, knew exactly what Bayo1 cost to make and revenue it generated, and decided not to proceed with its sequel. That should tell you that unless Bayo2 is significantly cheaper than Bayo1 to make (despite being from reviews a larger, more fleshed out game), then 1 million sales isn't going to be enough to cover the cost of Bayo2 AND the port of Bayo1. Sure, its on one console instead of two, but developing the game engine is only a small part of the total game development, the creation of all the graphic and sound assets, level design,voice acting, etc, are shared across platforms. Developing a game for one console is unlikely to be significantly cheaper than developing for two or more. Actually, with the port of Bayo1, effectively it has cost them the same as releasing on multiple platforms, because they've had to rewrite Bayo1 for the Wii U, making 1 million sales even less likely to generate a profit for Nintendo than before. |
The keyword is profits... You assuming that 2 million units sold was not enough to justify a sequel for Sega because they want to make as much profit for the game as they can, but for Nintendo they are not just concerned about profit, they also want to increase the appeal of the console, it is possible that with 1 million units they don't make a profit, but if they recover the cost of the game, it should be enough.
There are 2 more things to take into account, when a 3rd party publishes something on the console they have to pay royalties to the console owner, those go as high as 12 U$ per copy of the game, but are usually more on the line of 9 U$, those Nintendo does not have to pay to themselves, so they make more money out of each copy, the other thing is development tool, every third party developer pays for their kits, but again Nintendo does not pays itself for those (this is not a big amount any way, but it does count).
So the game is a little cheaper to make, they make more money out of each copy and the goal is not to profit from it but to recover costs and increase the perceived value of the console, taking those into account 1 million copies sold could be a success for Nintendo, not a profit success, but a success any way.
