| shikamaru317 said: The thing is, if you sell at a system at a loss early in a generation, it pushes sales considerably. The more a console sells early on, the more owners there are obviously; owners who will buys games, accessories, online subscriptions, etc. throughout the rest of the generation, which means you make back all of what you lost on the system itself and then some by the end of the generation. So here's a hypothetical situation for you: Switch at $300 with no bundled game sells 6m this year (made up number for the sake of the example). But, Switch at $250 with a bundled game would have sold to 10m people this year. That's 4m extra people who will potentially be buying games, online subs, and Nintendo's ridiculously overpriced accessories this year. All it takes to make back the $50 they lose on the console is 1 game sale and 1 accessory sale for each of the people who bought it (they lose basically nothing on the bundled game because it's 1st party; they lose a possible, but not guaranteed sale of the game). And those 4m extra owners don't just buy games and accessories this year, they buy them throughout the rest of the generation. That's well worth selling the system at a loss imo. |
Excellent point. Plus, if it sells 10m 3rd party developers are much more likely to start making a game for it.
Most AA(A) developers thought the psv would either fail or underperform and they didn't announce games for it. The more of them were scared of failure, the fewer were persuaded to take a risk.
And the sooner the game is made and released, the bigger impact it will have. Because even great games fail to sell when released when most people have given up on a console (e.g. Tearaway, Killzone on psvita).
