| Ka-pi96 said: Don't really know how much they've supported handhelds, because I don't much care for them personally but Konami have been consistently profitable. Haven't seen all the figures but I would expect Koei Tecmo and Namco Bandai to have been making money regularly as well.
No, none of those regularly turn out massively expensive AAA games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but... neither do Nintendo. |
None of those companies you mentioned come close to annually supporting a console and a handheld with consistent quality titles like Nintendo does.
On the costs of Nintendo's game developments, do you know how much they cost? And even if so, Iwata has already said how expensive it is to develop these days:
The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them. In short, the development teams of "Pikmin 3" and other future games were understaffed during that period. We do not simply have one easily identifiable bottleneck in software development. These days it is becoming increasingly challenging to determine the minimum development resources required for customer satisfaction. The point I am trying to get across is that currently it is more challenging to sell packaged software for around $50-$60. On the other hand, we can offer digital games in other formats. It is true that it is becoming increasingly challenging to meet the expectations of consumers who are willing to pay $50-$60 for a game, and it is difficult to break even unless a huge number of units is sold all over the world, so it cannot be denied that software development is becoming more challenging. Among such packaged software, however, the sales of popular games are much larger than in the past. Therefore, if we create more hit games, the software development business can still be very profitable. All games break even if they sell millions of copies worldwide, so we will continue to do our best to develop games which have high sales potential.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/130430qa/03.html
