Other than that, marketing is raising cost way too much. Heck you have CoD which is "cheap" to make ($40-$50 million) at least compare to some other games, but has a marketing budget of $200 million. The image that says that marketing is 7% of the total game cost is kind of wrong (well is from 2006 after all). Tim Schafer said: "Nowadays, a huge portion of a game's budget resides in marketing, in fact, for some games, 200% of the budget will go into marketing while the game itself will cost anywhere between $10 and $20 million to actually design and produce."

So yeah marketing is also one of the biggest problems. But marketing is something that you can't really avoid if you want your game to be successful.

Fat Jeff Gerstsman gave (the awful) State of Emergency a higher score than Zelda Majora's Mask when he worked at Gamespot.  Anything that slob says is irrelevant.  He has a history of rating Nintendo games low.

Yep. There are numerous examples of poor management. At least with GT5, they had GT5:Prologue to bring money in to fund it. Duke and Aliens were disasters and The Last Guardian is one of the biggest fuckups in the history of game development.

Versus is likely to never make back what its gonna cost (Im betting a budget of $200M+) and I think a large part of the blame here goes to Wada again. He allowed the company to release a broken MMO (All SE's devtime/resources went into getting it fixed) and continued the releases of a game the fanbase simply doesnt want (FFXIII). I fully expect Versus to become XV, just so it doesnt have the "XIII" drawback that will come with it, while Lightning Returns will bomb.

Eugh. I really hate how Square Enix have treated Final Fantasy this generation.

IMO, the best kind of marketing you can get is word of mouth. They key to a positive word of mouth is to make a good game. Look at games like Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles or for the best possible example - Wii Sports.

Yeah, it helps to have your game plastered down the side of a building. It helps a lot. But if people buy your game day 1 on hype and it ends up being one of the biggest disappointments of the generation (Were back to FFXIII here), then it will have a really bad affect on your game and sequels. FFXIII on PS3 actually had a higher Week 1, launches aligned, than what XIII-2 has sold on PS3 LTD. Same with the 360 versions. The legs were awful and the follow up did rubbish too.

I have to seriously wonder if almost anyone watched this video. It was a complete joke.

This thing read like a prayer that we all go back to the PS2 and ten years ago only this time with Microsoft heading the way.

Pachter starts off right away admitting he pulled his numbers out of his butt. They are completely made up.

Then they get into his fantasy, the next generation is going to be a smaller base and cost more but people won't care because the real cost will be hidden by an Xbox live subscription service. Thus the most expensive console solution and a subscription likely to always on internet service will win because people really want a $500 console so they can use it as a cable box.

I can't believe almost no one in this thread hasn't laughed out loud about this claim.

Here is the only point they seemed to get right. This generation has been the most expensive with no real price cuts ($100) over the 6-7 years and no dropping of the price to impulse buy territory. However the effect of this has been that younger kids have moved on to 3DS's, tablets and smartphones at the lower price points.

He spends all his time waxing on about a $99 Microsoft console. That would mean carrying about $400 worth of subsidy across two years. Add in a little bit of processing fees and profits and that means Microsoft is going to somehow convince people to give them $20 a month (minimum)for Xbox live service plus the console for the next two years. They aren't doing this because of the amazing games but again, because they want to watch television.

Per this video, the next killer game isn't something that uses 8 gigs of RAM and rocks it out at 1080p at 60 fps. It is television. That is just ridiculous.

Understand it isn't ridiculous to say that people will watch Netflix on their console. It is ridiculous to say that you will gladly pay a subsidized/subscription price to watch Netflix and have a few more services on your next console. If I said to any of you, give me $20 a month for the next two years so you can pay Netflix an additional $8 a month to stream video to your house but perhaps you can watch their streaming at 1080P instead of 720P with what you currently own, you'd laugh out loud.

Ask yourself, if the next generation consoles are going to offer the most amazing and compelling gaming experiences every, why is everyone predicting sales of fewer total consoles sold? If this upgrade in experience is so compelling, then why is it predicted that fewer people will buy it?

Fewer will buy it because of what it is competing against and at what price points those other solutions will come in at compared to these next gen consoles.

These $500(likely) streaming television solutions will be competing against $60 boxes like Roku and $100 boxes like Apple TV. I have no doubt that by next Christmas there will be plenty of $100 tablets with the specs of the Nexus 7.

Nintendo might have a chance because they are offering a compelling solution at a price that can still drop into impulse buy area. Sony and Microsoft can still drop their current gen consoles but that will just make the next gen solutions look that much more expensive (not that most of them weren't bought at $199 Christmas sales anyway the last couple years.)

Microsoft is being downgraded. Sony is almost broke. Both are doubling down on failed strategies.

Wow Nintendo fans want the entire industry to fall because their beloved company might not be number one this gen so they can tell us I told you so

Well, who's to blame? Nintendo deserves to be criticized, they did that to Sony too until they got their shit together.

We want the industry to fail because we don't endorse $500 boxes with $70 games? (Pachter predicted that as well.)

We want the industry to fail because we don't see $60 games with multiple $15 DLC packs as a norm?

A lot of good posts in this thread.

who is forcing you to buy them?? So because you can afford a 500$ console you don't want anyone to have access to them. what about Nintendo keeping their game full price for the entire gen or all those useless peripheral they release you like that better??

Of course that is utterly laughable. Pretty much like everything that Pachter has always said. He's just a clown and at best a troll at this point.