Nintendo should stop making games for the wiiu too since they are average less sales per game than on wii. (idiot)

Posting so I can return later to mock.

I don't quite understand this perspective. Who was making money on the PS3 and 360 when their install bases were under 5 million? Think about the numbers because they haven't magically changed for the Wii U, this issue has been the same for many years now, at least since the blow-out in average games budgets since the mid 2000s

Certainly early in a system's life there are a always few break-out successes but the vast majority of titles probably don't make much, if any, money. It's the reason why most initial games tend to be quick ports, the numbers simply can't justify large investments early in a system's life. Some of the larger companies can afford to, but they are banking on either being one of the break-out successes or releasing an evergreen title whose sales will grow with the user-base.

Some generic numbers:
3 million systems
2-3 games per person
30 launch titles
= 200-300000 copies per title (if all titles sell equally)

Throw in 3 games that sell 1 million each
- ~100-200000 average sales for your remaining games
- or more realistically a bunch of games that never pass 100K and a number that sell several hundreds of thousands of copies.

I don't know precisely what kind of margins game publishers normally have but with the above numbers you are likely to have a significant number of companies struggling to make profit on even moderate-budget titles. The factors which swing in your favour are higher than usual attach rates, rapidly expanding user-base or fewer launch titles but in the end I don't see how people are expecting software miracles with such a small number of any hardware platform. I would imagine that the games publishers hope for break-out success early in a systems life but I can't see how they would expect it.

Given the above my answer is no. You are comparing end of life software sell through with early life sell through. Attach rates increase through a system's life and furthermore your average sales per game will increase as the advent of blockbusters releases (that skew the average) is almost a given with publishers as large as EA and Activision.

Finally, someone who doesn't have the brain capacity of a 3 year old.

Umm Ubisoft hasn't went anywhere,  Ubisoft has been releasing games on WiiU since the begining, and i havnt seen signs of stopping. EA and Activision hasnt done anything with the WiiU since it launched, so how can they bail out if they never started?

@hsrob

I would not think it was a matter of expecting miracles. Just a matter of the reality matching realistic expectations on the part of publisher. When a publisher puts out a critically acclaimed title, or one that has a reputation for fairly high sales. They expect even a new platform to mirror that. Obviously it cannot mirror the volume on more established platforms, but they probably expect a roughly similar attach ratio, or actually a greater one given the lack of serious competition.

For Activision a three percent attach ratio for Skylanders, or a six percent attach ratio on Call of Duty. Probably would not have been in their minds when they produced the titles for the platform. They might expect such sales from their properties that were less recognized, or less profitable, but probably not for what would qualify as major franchises. Especially when Call of Duty is the sixth best performing title on the platform.

I honestly think that Activision would have expected to have hit the mark with at least one of those titles. Enough so to at the very least score a ten percent attach ratio, and it probably would be reasonable during any other launch. Except that Nintendo ate up well over half of the software sales. That of coarse brings to light the elephant in the room. The basic it is impossible to beat Nintendo on its console, and it is even foolish to actually try.

Which the numbers are actually bearing out for us. Activision on its very best game is seeing a attach ratio of about a tenth of what Nintendo is seeing with New Super Mario Bros. It wasn't the case being made in the original post, but it is really part of the problem, and should be pointed out. How do you think a good game that isn't Nintendos should perform on the Wii U?

My point though is that any expectation that developers have early in a systems life would have to be relatively soft expectations.  I don't doubt that they hoped that some/one of their games would do better. All it takes though is a Mario Bros. or a Nintendoland to steal your sales, particularly early on when people are short on money after shelling out for a new system.

I also suspect (I have no evidence mind you) that the majority of early console adopters are multi-console owners.  If true it would stand to reason that any third party game that came to the Wii U weeks or months after it was released on other systems would struggle to sell as Wii U owners may have already purchashed these games on other systems. Let's see how games released at the same time do.

Are third parties likely to struggle in this kind of environment, at least initially? Absolutely! But, I expect they knew this before they started and I can't see how anything that has happened so far, which incidentally is still really early in the game, would dissuade them from continuing to try find success.

Third party sales have always been a strange beast on Nintendo systems and while Nintendo always dominates software sales on it's own systems there are ALWAYS a group of third parties that do very well out of the fans who don't want to exclusively play Nintendo games.  I don't think Activision could conclude after three months that they aren't going to be one of those third parties.

It would be very interesting to look at all those games sold by Activision and EA on the Wii and see the number of hits, versus not, and how sales did early in the system's life to give a little more context to the current Wii U software sales.

I have no comment for the first part as you clearly do not know who runs companies. HINT: People not robots.

They will go wherever the money is? Guessing PS4 and nextbo will have no launch titles from 3rd parties then?

As for Ubisoft, your so full of shit man.

In other threads you go preaching that Ubisoft "delayed" Rayman so they can have one marketing campaign and now you are saying Ubisoft are bailing out.

Make up your mind.

I'm not sure if we can say Activision is taking the EA route yet.

Why would Activision release a next gen COD on PS4/nextbox if the userbase of will be small in the first couple years.

They may as well focus on PS360 and skip WiiU/PS4/nextbox.