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Cerebralbore101 on 16 June 2017
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Hiku said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

I love Monster Hunter and will be getting World. But Capcom is about to learn a hard lesson. More AA games turn a profit than AAA games. Most of Atlus' JRPGs don't sell too well, but they were the only profitable branch of Index Corp. Why? Because they kept their development costs down.

Bravely Default was a quick project and it sold 1.39 million units. 

Final Fantasy XV took ten years to produce and sold 5 million units. 

Guess what? Bravely Default was way the hell more profitable. 

The same thing is going to happen between MH4, and MH Worlds. Even if Worlds is a huge success and sells 5 million copies, it won't be as profitable as MH4. 

That may very well be true, but you're omitting a very important factor in your comparison. Well, two actually. For starters, FFXV retails for $60 while Bravely Default retails for $40. Secondly, DLC accounts for profit as well. It has some additional development cost but minescule compared to the original development of the game. And FFXV has a lot more significant DLC content (which is still coming out) than Bravely Default does. If everyone who bought FFXV gets DLC worth just $20, that's like buying two copies of Bravely Default. So in your copmparison, you could double the 5 million units sold to 10 million units sold. Etc.

That is the single best explaination of why companies do DLC that I have ever heard. Would you believe that FFXV just broke even on that 5 million sales? It costs $600,000 to $1,800,000 to develop a 3DS game. Even if Square only netted $10 per copy of Bravely they would have made a profit of 13 million. That's a profit ratio of seven to one, even if we assume development costs of 1.8 million. Assuming that FFXV pocketed $13 per game sale we can assume that FFXV cost sixtyfive million to produce. If everyone bought their DLC for $20 that would be a hundred million in profit from DLC. So we have FFXV that spent 65 million to make 165 million, versus Bravely which spent 1.8 million (worst case scenario) to make 13 million. 

AA games often make several times their production costs back. Tons of AAA games outright fail to make any money back period. 

Bringing this back on topic, the OP is mostly right. Capcom will either wind up porting Worlds to the Switch, or they will go back to making portable MH games.  Either way Switch is getting a new Monster Hunter eventually.