Is It True That 3rd Party Games Can't Sell on the Wii? Figures say No.

[HappySqurriel]

bardicverse said:

Kyros said:

but to flop they'd have to do truly miniscule numbers.

Possibly true, I do not know about the development costs for these. But of course a game that costs 1million to develop needs much less sales than a game that costs 50 million to develop.

A game is a flop if it
a) doesn't return its development costs and/or
b) sells much less than expected

but userbase doesn't really come into that does it? I mean a game isn't more of a flop if it sells 50000 on the Wii than on the PS3 with half the userbase.

 The average wii game is said t cost between 3-5 million for development, where the PS3/XB360 can range from 10-20 million according to dev reports from GDC

I see your point about the flop thing, what I am saying is that people dont understand that a game that sells a few hundred thousand on the Wii is making the same money as a million seller on the ps3 or xb360. 

 

I think I'm personally annoyed more by the fact that people pick on Zack and Wiki, and No More Heroes as flops and never consider that they're low budget even for Wii games; Zack and Wiki's level based format allows them to reuse most of their graphical assets on several levels, and No More Heroes uses cell shading (in part) because it greatly reduces the ammount of texture work (and if you notice the area is pretty sparse in terms of unnecessary assets). It is quite possible that both these games were in the $1 to $2 Million range to develop, which in terms of return on investment is their sales are similar to sales of 2.5 to 5 Million for a $20 Million budget XBox 360/PS3 game (and 12.5 to 25 Million for a game in the $100 Million budget range like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4 are rumored to be).