Miyamoto: Breath of the Wild Needs to sell 2 million.

[DonFerrari]

wombat123 said:

DonFerrari said:

You know how much sense would make to think ... well this game development cost 20M, but it's a little generic and probably would sell only 1M (having like 10M profit, or 50% over the investiment) so let's toss 100M at it and expect to sell at least 5M to break even make? Makes zero sense, so it's just your opinion that the game is derivative and they tossed money at it to cover it. ok.

Value and cost are two different things with not much of a connection. But expecting to find it normal that a game costing 2% of the revenue they are making as acceptable as a customer is quite crazy.

And you know why I'm certain it's crazy? Because about every customer complain about things being too expensive and the company is only getting 3-10% margin, so I'm pretty sure it's senseless to say 80% margin is reasonable.

No it isn't their money. It's your money that you gave then for their product. If you as customer think they should be doing things different than you shouldn't be giving they your money or you are only enforcing what they are doing. It's the endless cicle in videogames, gamers complain at what a company is doing or about a game but end buying it anyway. Do you think the company is going to care about the complains? Hell no.

In my opinion -- development and advertising budgets in general have gotten out of hand.  I see it as a snowball effect of companies wanting to have their own CoD or GTA franchise that sells a ton but not wanting to try anything new or unique in that investment and risk losing money, so they go for tried and tested formulas for low risk investments and try to differentiate themselves by investing in graphics, voice acting and marketing -- because it's a formula that's been proven to work.  That's not to say that all AAA games take this approach but a lot of them do -- in my opinion.

And yes, it is their money.  After you give them your money for their game and don't return their game, it's their money.  If they want to piss it away, that's their business but if they do so, they'll ruin their relationship with their customers and quickly go out of business.  As for if a company is going to care about customer complaints?  Yes -- if it affects their profits.  Hell, companies caring too much about customer opinions is one of the bigger problems we currently have because of a minority of virtue signaler SJWs trying to speak for the majority of gamers and insert their politics into games.

Paying full price for a low budget game may not be acceptable to many consumers but milllions of people still do it when it comes to a lot of those  games because they've determined that the game itself is worth 60 dollars -- same way people spend 60 dollars on derivitive (in my opinion) AAA titles and determine it's worth their money.  You say everyone complains about certain low budget games being too expensive but apparently not enough of them put their money where their mouths are for those companies to lower their prices.   You say that a game costing 2% of the revenue they are making is crazy but then you look at a company like Apple and what they charge for their products or Nike and what they charge for their shoes and it just all comes down to what the market determines something should cost.  Just because you and people you know in real life and on online forums think that's not acceptable isn't going to stop them from charging what they charge as long as people still buy it at their asking price.

Ok, so about the first point now we are at agreement. Some or a lot of budgets seem out of control because of marketing cost and bad management decision on what to invest the budget.

So on the second post you basically agree with me. They only care if it affects profit (meaning that if you complain but still buy you aren't truly showing your disatisfaction) and the SJWs is so ridiculous because the company ends up changing a game and losing the crowd that bought before without the SJW then buying the game that was changed for them. And Saying it's their money after you paid isn't contradicting what I said, because they need a constant flow of money and that is in your hand and for them to get it they must show that they are doing good use of what you already gave them.

So you agree with me on the third point (and yes I agree the market buying it for 60 they are agreeing that for them that value is right, be it low budget or crap AAA games). And there are a lot of people that complain about Apple and Nike margin (and they aren't above 30% as far as I know) but you see more complains in other markets than on VG (where we have more people complaining about the 60,00 of GTA than to the perpetuous 60,00 of a Mario Kart). And yes I agree that the price the market is willing to accept enable companies to charge it.