460k for a niche game is excellent on a 3.2M user base! They should just have kept costs under control.

That's actually pretty good, but what I'd like to know is their supposed "low budget". What exactly is "low" to them? Because that sounds like a good amount of money from those games. 

Looking back at it - yes it does. Must be overtracked by a lot then. Any chances we'll ever see official numbers for this game?

500k on a non-hd console is ok. maybe break even/profitable, but i think people are no realizing that hd games cost more to make. It's one of the things i've hated about the new generation. Studios are all seemingly going to mobile games because if they make an hd game and it fails, half the time their studio closes.

it did ok. Still i have no confidence on better 3rd party games for the Wii U in the future

fucking bullshit journalism. gameindustry did not interview the yves guillemont. This is just an assumption made by the writer. At no point in the article did he directly quote Yves. Fucking bullshit journalism - he assumes that zombiu did not make a profit because rayman legend was made multiplat

this is what is written at the original source

Yves Guillemot, Chairman and CEO of Ubisoft, is typically one of the biggest proponents of new systems, but betting big on the Wii U didn't work out well for the company. ZombiU, one of the most popular launch titles for the system with players, was not profitable, he says. Not even close. As such, he says, there are no plans (or even desire) for a sequel.

It was, in fact, because of that game's performance that Ubisoft decided to make Rayman Legends a multiplatform game.

"We must find a way to ensure the creativity of those games could have a big enough audience," he says. "We hope it will take off. At the moment, we've said 'let's do through Christmas and see where we are from there.'"

Where is the truth? Where did that idea come from? What evidence is there that it's still happening? I can point out example after example of mature games selling on Nintendo consoles and yet this idea persists.

Wow thats harsh....Though it has sold around 450k now lots of those sales would have been selling at half price as it is now.

Sucks because I remember reading maybe a squeal was in the works.

A lot of nintendo fans touted ZombieU as one of the Wii U's key exclusives precisely because of its production values and its hardcore nature (doesnt get much more hardcore than a survival horror) and now a lot seem to be saying they should have made a cheaper game which should have made a profit by now. I mean realistically speaking most retail games nowdays ( and Im not talking AAA) generally need around 1M sales to make a profit so the fact that isnt profitable on the back of weak sales due to weak Wii U sales isnt surprising. I just find it strange that a number of fans seem to be blaming this on the fact that it is a AAA title (in fact I suspect its high sales compared with nintendo IPs is due to its exposure as an exclusive high value 3rd party title) rather than blaming the main culprit - low Wii U sales!!

Right, so they proceeded to budget a game with a sales target greater than 500K without any idea of how many consoles would sell. Instead of setting an achievable target (15 percent of early adopters bought their mediocre game) or releasing it on other platforms with exponentially more consoles in the wild.

I guess they better learn to project sales before all these Xbox1/PS4 exclusives come out. No way are those systems going to sell quickly enough to support niche 1 million-selling games like ZombiU in the first six months. I guess it helps those two are coming out simultaneously so they hopefully double sales potential, but let's see how The Crew does, for example. You think that's going to sell enough to early adopters to recoup its astronomical costs?