Possible effects of Nintendo going mobile. (comparing Captain Toad and Monument Valley)

[Mnementh]

Ka-pi96 said:

Mnementh said:

Are the 5 million revenue for Monument valley before or after AppleStore/Play Store took their shares?

Good comparison by the way, thanks. It shows something. Captain Toad is a small scale production at lower price and not a megaseller. Still it can secure a bigger revenue than the similar mobile game. It shows the risks on console are lower for devs and they can therefore invest more into games, especially at full price. The games tend to get more quality in the result, as the budget can be more generous.

Yeah, I think there was a thread recently calling for lower prices on games as well. Well this is a good example of how lower prices aren't always a good thing. Sure games will sell more, but will they sell enough extra copies to make up the revenue difference? I expect in most cases they wouldn't.

Yeah, it is a bit more difficult than lower prices = better sales. To make up for halving the price, you need to double the sales. As mobile games often are less then a tenth of the price of console games, you need 10 times the sales. Also some cost stay constant, despite the price. For retail games they are packaging, storage, delivery. So you probably need more than double the sales on halved prices to get to the same revenue. For this reason mobile games are exclusively digital, as the costs for the single copy are very low.

Also, will lower prices get to more sales in the same degree? Depends probably on the game. If gamers of genre X have a pickup mentality - oh look it's cheap and loks fun - this may work. Classical console gamers tend to be strong fans of special series, so they might not pick up casually a competing game instead, only because it is cheaper. They may buy the competing game additionally. That means the sales for these types of games are probably pretty much fixed to the size of the fanbase, despite the circumstances. Look at the sales of Monster Hunter. Despite being on a different platform japanese sales of Monster Hunter 4 are comparable to the PSP-entries.

Which type are typical games? Well, Mario Kart for instance seems in part play into these pickup-mentality. It's sales are correlating somewhat to the popularity of the platform. Still, Mario Kart Wii is more popular than Mario Kart DS, although DS was bigger. In general the size of the platform is important, Mario Kart GC and WiiU have low sales. Zelda on the other hand - the sales of main Zelda-entries aren't very dependant on sales. While the GC-entry Wind Waker is among the ones with the lowest sales, it's also true for the SNES-entry A Link to the Past, although the SNES had three times the userbase as the GC. So we could assume something like Mario Kart might sell better on mobiles with a low price (although it's difficult to guess if enough to make up for the lower price), while something like Zelda will sell almost the same, despite price and platform.

So basically all people who want Nintendo to go mobile want the death of Zelda.