First Ubi didn't make COD.
I know that full well, this isn’t only about Ubi, but also 3rd parties in general and the CoD franchise is the perfect example of difference in consumer habits and purchasing intent of most Nintendo owners.
You mention ZombiU. It sold no worse than Red Steel I or II. Those were both exclusives to Nintendo consoles as well. The difference is that somehow they didn't lose money while selling over 650k copies. Apparently in this day and age you can sell that much and still lose your ass. That isn't the fault of Nintendo though.
Red Steel I and II were released on the original Wii. Have you noticed that Nintendo finally made the HD transition? Development costs have risen a great deal and the Wii U is basically on par with, or slightly above the 360 and PS3 in development costs. What was required to make a profit on an average Wii title is bound to be a lot lower than on the Wii U, that’s quite simple the most basic premise of the whole profits discussion.
This is the very same reason why Nintendo are struggling to release their own games in time; rising cost and development time and they have fairly small teams.
A multiplat title costs about 20 million dollars on average while a single platform costs 9 million on average (2012 numbers).
AC4 wasn't a great effort. It was just a port from PS3/360. In this day and age the engines and content shouldn't have a big problem scaling. On PC turning all these resolutions and features on or off isn't an entire support team or some massive level of personnel. It is a preferene setting within the app. That said the game still works, still sells fewer copies and DLC and other items are available.
Actually; AC4 released simultaneously on Wii U, 360 and PS3 and was ported to PS4 and One. They even had to patch in full resolution support on PS4 after it had released. It was a good effort on the Wii U, certainly on par with PS3/360. The AnvilNext engine is a transitional engine made to ease development across the 7th and 8th generation platforms more easily.
It still sold terribly, leading Ubisoft to believe, with good reason that the Wii U audience simply aren’t interested in the AC franchise at all.
Did you read what I just typed? The PC version of ACIV has sold .37 million copies, and appears to not have any money, online server, DLC or other concerns even with a massive number of hardware configurations to deal with in terms of support.
AC was never big on PC, that’s what I’m saying though; demographics matter. Call of Duty also sells pretty badly on PC, same with Battlefield.
And it’s not because all PC gamers are pirates; the average demographic is simply different.
This stuff should all be easy, scalable and flexible by now. If it isn't and needs to have millions being spent fine tuning and massaging it, that is on the publisher, not Nintendo. Again on the mobile side the prices are a tenth, the support concerns a magnatude of order larger and at all works out.
It is scalable and flexible, most developers have gained a lot of experience and developed a slew of tools for HD development, there is also a lot of middleware available to lower costs. This is the primary reason why the development cost rose so little between the 7th and 8th gen.
Nintendo are among the only major developer/publishers in the world who have almost zero experience with HD development and they were caught with their pants down in terms of cost and time frame.
Besides; even though production costs can’t possibly be blamed on Nintendo and their fans; the fact that there is seemingly no culture and interest for these games, can. How is it not the consumers fault if 6 million people decide to purchase 100k copies of a game?
If the very same game sells 15 times as much on a different platform; there’s clearly a market for it, just not on this particular platform, so it’s not about the software itself being of poor quality either. And how is it not Nintendo’s fault for having created a core following with such narrow preferences by basically never deviating from the same formula and approach for decades? I don’t subscribe to the whole “Nintendo gamers just have such incredibly high standards” that a lot of vgchartz member always drone on about; I believe it’s more about enjoying a certain type of games and gameplay elements and not appreciating elements and directions of a lot of other games (just like I prefer Half-Life 2 over any Call of Duty, we all like different things).
These gamers are then put off by other games, again; just like me with a lot of franchises.
For instance; I lap up almost anything in isometric RPG’s, while the vast majority of gamers don’t, and I am put off by RPG games that aim very differently and lack certain elements I like, thus there is automatically anything inherently wrong with those games I avoid; I’m simply not in the demographic.
It’s a combination of things and most core Nintendo gamers simply appear uninterested in certain types of games, which is fine in and on itself.
Consoles were supposed to be the solution to expensive, buggy and time intensive PC's. Put a game in and play without concerns about drive updates, incompatibilty, etc.
This I agree and disagree with; I agree that console gaming has become more PC like and less simple but I disagree that PC’s are so “buggy, expensive and time intensive”, that’s highly exaggerated. Development costs for PC titles have been the lowest relative to returns for at least two decades and they’re not that complicated today; anyone with enough technical insight to use a smartphone should be able to use Steam and other services with ease. Everyone knows how to work a PC today.
Instead the whole industry has become LIKE the PC industry which is expensive and dying on the vine.
Yeah, the only thing more tired than “Nintendo is doomed” is; “PC gaming is dying”. PC gaming has actually grown in the past five-six years, even with the smartphone/tablet revolution. Consoles, both dedicated handhelds and home consoles, however, are taking a hit and will suffer a major market contraction, so this is flat out wrong.
That industry is dying because when someone can take an iPad and replicate an app for $10 that used to cost $300 on the PC, and then required a $1000 box with $200 service contract, there wasn't anyway that someone would choose the latter. They choose the former and on top of it the former is a magnatude of order cheaper and easier.
A 300$ program on the PC replicated by a 10$ app? You know that that’s impossible, you can get editing programs, Windows 8.1 Pro and Photoshop for less than 300$ and no 10$ app can replicate a whole OS or a full version of Photoshop.
1200$ for a PC? What age are you living in? That can get you a gaming monster; a decent desktop or laptop PC won’t cost you more than a good tablet or smartphone, perhaps even less.
I use Apple as an example but the reality is that you can do just as well with $150 Kindle or some cheap Android tablet. Perhaps the experience is 10-15% better on a console but if the costs are several hundred percent higher then the industry is dead.
Are you talking gaming here? Gaming experiences are 10-15% better on consoles? How can you possibly measure that? Or is it apps you’re talking about? Then that is irrelevant to the discussion since this is about game development and sales and ROI.
The question isn't about Nintendo. The question is why can Ubisoft not make a profit when selling a quarter million copies at $60 a pop.
Excuse me? You think Ubisoft gets the whole 60$ a game retails for? Do you also know that games go down in price in time? An average 60$ release leaves about 27$ for development cost, marketing and print, if you remove marketing and print, that likely leaves a maximum of 20$ that actually goes directly towards the creator/publisher. Factor in lowered price over time and, as an example, 1 million sales over two year won’t net you much. If the game cost 9 million $ to make (the average cost as of 2012) and you have about 20$ per unit going directly to you and the price lowers into about half after one year and 500k sales; that doesn’t leave a huge number after taxes.
I hope you don’t honestly believe that publishers/developers get the whole 60$ for every copy sold.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html
When all they are doing is taking the same content, the same engine and sending it all off to the same places to be burned and packaged in the same packaging with slightly different color paper in the sleeve, why is $15,000,000 not enough to make a dime on that? A team of 5-10 people could easily modify that game engine for WiiU. Even if it took them a year and you paid them $150k each that would be $3 million a most. Nevermind that a team of ten people slaving away for a year should probably get your an entirely new engine, not just modify an existing one.
You think you create the same code for all platforms? Every hardware configuration requires its own solutions, and the different solutions do not coincide most of the time, especially when the One and PS4 have entirely different chipsets and shader generations/versions than PS3/360 and Wii U, the Wii U shares a PowerPC configuration with PS3/360 but it has three different processors and different RAM, and a different, low consumption GPU, so it is different from both PS3/360 and One/PS4.
Multiplatform development consists of more than building one universal string of code and then printing discs which go into different color sleeves. It’s not like making a movie and then releasing on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming services.
Assassin’s Creed 4 cost about 100 million $ to make according to estimates (including One and PS4 ports), let’s divide that by the six platforms it is available on, that makes about 16.6 million $ per platform to break even. That’s how multiplatform works; the company as a whole funds the production across all platforms and the total returns are tallied, if one or more platforms give poor returns on their end; they cut them out and save development time and cost, business 101.
They would need about 615-820k sales per platform to break even (depending on marketing efforts and whether or not you factor that in), if four of those platforms move 1.5-2 million copies and two platforms move 150-300k copies, what do you think they will do?
Assign their 1000 man team across 7 studios to spend the same amount of time and hassle the next time around for the platforms that yield the least returns or cut them out of the process and focus on the other versions and perhaps sell even more of the next iteration?
Developers don’t release games on platforms just for the hell of it; if they’re seeing small or negative returns on developer time and effort; they will eventually axe it.
Poor business sense would be continuing support in such a case.
The numbers for the console industry don't make sense. It's much like cable, YouTube and movies.
How does Youtube fit into this mix and point? It’s a versatile streaming service without productions; it’s an entertainment portal and not a set production of any kind. It’s like roads and cars; the roads provide a transportation segue but has nothing to do with the manufacture of cars. Cable, cinema and gaming have a lot of similarities, true, but Youtube has nothing to do with this what so ever, I don’t even understand why you wrote that.
Every new movie is a blockbuster that cost a quarter billion to make, requires a quarter billion in marketing and most of the time yields a movie that is still a smelly turd. Compare that with Walking Dead which gets by on about $3 million per episode and that means an entire season can cost less than $60 million for hours more of entertainment.
This is true, no doubt, but it’s the ambition that runs away with the cost, the focus is on gloss and production value before creative output and depth, I very much agree that this is the same major issue in gaming today.
Development costs as such are not killing the industry; it’s the overreaching ambition that causes the problem.
The Walking Dead truly is an amazing show, but there are shows with massive budgets that are amazing as well, just like with games (Band of Brothers and Rome, for instance).
The cost of entertainment is becoming profoundly commoditized.
Agreed, it is becoming increasingly shallow and budgets are largely wasted.
Nintendo isn't the problem there. They are actually doing as well as can be done in my opinion.
If you think sheer cost; the most successful Indies are the best way to do it; look at Minecraft, tiny development budget, massive sales.
Or Angry Birds, Farmville and other simple fare that sells cheaply but in the 100’s of millions units/downloads.
If you think creatively; Nintendo are hardly re-inventing the wheel here, they are probably among the most timid developers/publishers in the console world and almost all new IP’s are low-risk, shallow efforts (such as the Wii series).
They have also jumped on the HD remake bandwagon, something others were heavily criticized for in the 7th gen (by Nintendo fans in here).
3rd parties are guilty of a creative copout as well; they follow trends and fads slavishly but Nintendo are doing the exact same thing, only with their own trends and fads, neither are traditions which lend a terribly exciting prospect for the future of gaming, in my opinion.
Supporting a failed model for longer doesn't change the fact it is failed. Microsoft is losing money, Sony is losing money and Nintendo is losing money all while most of them are charging more than ever for the same experience but now with more.... who really knows what to justy the higher costs.
Nintendo has moved closer to the Microsoft and Sony model with the Wii U and into territory where they have no pedigree and experience. The problem for me with the “Nintendo solution” is that it often leads to lacking depth; while I appreciate awesome gameplay, I would never want all games to become like Nintendo games.
For me, games are a fantastic medium for conveying stories, provide a real challenge with depth, portray amazing characters and immerse you in choices and situations that make you think, feel and process.
There are even games with awesome gameplay and depth.
There is room for both, in my opinion, the big boys need to learn from the Indies; I recently finished two Indie titles (both kickstarter) and they are easily the two most amazing games I’ve played in the last year.
I feel like the quality of all games, including Nintendo, has fallen greatly since the 90’s and early 2000’s and I agree that it’s hard to justify the cost when all is said and done.
I don’t honestly think we’re actually in such disagreement in principle. We see the same problems but perhaps different solutions and we probably have different wishes and preferences as well.
I have a lot of wishes and desires and worries for and about the gaming industry, some of it can be found in the, now famous, UNITY thread if you want to read it (hint: I’m not a huge fan of PS4 or One and what they represent).
