By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Nintendo - Activision may follow Electronic Arts lead (Wii U)

Cobretti2 on 15 February 2013
hsrob said:
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.


The smarter publishers use the Wii to make budget titles that targeted casual, i.e carnival games. They then used the profits to make bigger budget titles on PS360 when the userbase was small.



 

 

Around the Network
NintendoPie on 15 February 2013
Cobretti2 said:
VGKing said:
At the very least, Activision will put out Skylanders games on Wii U.
Next-Gen Call of Duty is up in the air.


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.

This is what I'm thinking, releasing a CoD in a small userbase wouldn't be the best idea.



Dodece on 16 February 2013
hsrob said:
Dodece said:
@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 know what you mean we used to be able to do that on this site, but doing it by hand using the charts. The most apt correlation being Call of Duty 3. At this point in time during the Wii's lifecycle the game had sold roughly 350,000 units on roughly 4,460,000 consoles sold. Meaning that the game had a attach ratio of roughly eight percent on that console. So not only did that game sell more copies then its current counterpart on the Wii U. It actually sold twenty five percent better to that install base. So on the whole the franchise has obviously declined on the platform, and moving forward in the timeline it comes off even worse, because Call of Duty 3 was still selling over ten thousand units weekly while the Wii U version isn't even reaching three thousand per week.

It stands to reason as of now Activision has not only failed to make money off of the Wii U, but there is a strong possibility that Activision has lost a good amount of money on games for the console. As for another correlation the Xbox 360 was able to sell over a million copies of Call of Duty in its first year while it was really supply constrained. There doesn't seem to be any chance of that happening for the Wii U.



http://live.xbox.com/member/Dodece

Mr Khan on 16 February 2013
NintendoPie said:
Cobretti2 said:
VGKing said:
At the very least, Activision will put out Skylanders games on Wii U.
Next-Gen Call of Duty is up in the air.


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.

This is what I'm thinking, releasing a CoD in a small userbase wouldn't be the best idea.

Because all PS360 owners are contractually obligated to buy Orbis/Durango.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

cusman on 16 February 2013

Activision had:

  • Call of Duty Black Ops 2
  • Skylanders
  • 007 Legends

Did I miss anything?

Upcoming they have more Skylanders and Walking Dead, and I am sure next Call of Duty at some point. I think their Wii U support is about the same as their support for any other console.

...

EA had:

  • Mass Effect 3
  • Sports titles

I imagine they will continue to have sports titles, but they didn't bring Dead Space 3 and in their public press releases, they seem to be ignoring the Wii U.

Upcoming they have Need for Speed - Most Wanted... and I am sure the Sports titles. Don't expect much else at this point.

  •  

 



Around the Network
VGKing on 16 February 2013
phenom08 said:
^Lol no. 360/Ps3 will get next CoD so why would WiiU be "up in the air"?

I said NEXT-GEN Call of Duty, as in a Call of Duty game built from the ground up for PS4/720. A game that isn't on PS3 or 360. I don't see this happening until 2014 at the earliest though. No way Activision will abandon the 150million PS3360 owners. For now, all we will get is upscaled ports of PS3/360 games which sucks. That engine is ancient even by current-gen standards.



VGKing on 16 February 2013
Cobretti2 said:
VGKing said:
At the very least, Activision will put out Skylanders games on Wii U.
Next-Gen Call of Duty is up in the air.


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.

I know that. Like I said before we'll get current-gen ports to next-gen consoles. Eventually though, Call of Duty will be built exclusively for next-gen consoles. Who knows if Wii U will be able to handle it without major sacrifices.



errorpwns on 17 February 2013
Turkish said:
superchunk said:
How can anyone call it quits when the hardware just launched at its barely over 3m in userbase?

EA did quit because it never started. It has a personal beef over its origin service.

Activision isn't going anywhere.


Funny how you think Nintendo hurt EAs feelings not going for Origin. They're not people, they're a business. They'll go wherever is money, and currently there ain't no/little money to make with WiiU. Its not only EA thats bailing out, Ubisoft is aswel.

Corporations are considered people under law. The more you know. So yes, they are people.



Coshidawursti on 17 February 2013

Activision doesn't have the same problems as EA

EA has studios that use new engines
FB2 Engine and some probably the UE4 and later in the Gen probably more and push forward in the industry.

Activision will still use the same old Engine from 1999 for their biggest franchise aka CoD.
There is no effort behind it - Just put it on WiiU.Hell they could put it on the SNES without any problems.Every Smartphone can run CoD.
They only can win...No effort and no costs for more versions cause all run on Max settings while others have to optimize games for different hardware...From PC down to PS4/NextBox and then dooown to WiiU especially later this Gen.
Activision doesn't have these problems - They will make only more money.