Why are third party games selling well on Switch?

[MajorMalfunction]

Mnementh said:

MajorMalfunction said:

Indies are generally lower-cost endeavours wrt. developing and publishing. 400K sales is a hit SF2 because it's thirty years old. AAA doesn't give a shit. They make 27 million off 1m sales. Publishing is 20m upfront, net profit is 7m. Same revenue on PS4XB1, but you only spend 12m. If you're a business, what would you choose? Unless the market is saturated, I cannot in good conscience pick NSW. It just doesn't make sense to me. We haven't even spent a cent on development and NSW is already far behind in terms of opportunity cost.

Why does publishing cost nearly double on Switch?

Cost of carts mainly. All three take a chunk of sales as revenue (licensing). These costs are unavoidable, but for NSW, a 32 GB carts costs $20 or more / each. 8GB carts are in line with what MS/Sony charge for BD-50s used by XB1/PS4. 16 GB carts are in the middle. I did not include development costs, as those vary with engines, development teams, etc. You can get  a firm number by limiting to publishing costs only. On Wii U, Ubisoft went on the record saying an Wii U port was about 1m euros, but that was in-house. That's old information, but we later found out that no content changes were done, only code through leaked info. I didn't include this information because it varies by game and port choices (in-house vs. out-sourced).

EDIT: source on cost of carts: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/feature_exploring_the_switch_tax_and_why_nintendo_was_right_to_use_game_cards

Last edited by MajorMalfunction - on 10 August 2018