zorg1000 said:
It's also considerably cheaper to develop games for 3DS compared to Wii U so 3DS games don't necessarily need to sell more than Wii U games to be profitable. For example let's say the average 3DS game costs $3 million to make while the average Wii U game costs $10 million, these are just random numbers by the way, I have no idea how much it costs to make games for 3DS/Wii U. If Nintendo makes back $16 for 3DS games and $24 for Wii U games, they would need to sell 187,500 units of the 3DS game to break even and 417,000 units of the Wii U game to break even. It's very possible that a 1 million selling 3DS is game is more profitable than a 1 million selling Wii U game despite making less back on each 3DS game because it has lower dev costs. |
That's obviously true if it was a question of developing for WiiU OR 3DS. In this case they did both, obviously the 3DS version was a bit cheaper but you can't really tell how much each of the versions cost to make since a lot of the work from one version is also found in the other.
Besides, Smash is a big seller. Dev costs won't change the outcome dramatically.
bolded: Using your example, look what happens when a game is not only selling the amount to break even, but 1,000,000 as you said:
WiiU $24 * 1,000,000 units - $10m dev cost = $14m profit
3DS $16 * 1,000,000 units - $3m dev cost = $13m profit
The bigger the game, the less important are the dev costs.