*sigh* this has to be one of the most misrepresented quotes going around on this site. For one, that quote pertains to the 5 ports of existing games that ubi released in 2012, those being Assassin’s Creed III, Sports Connection, Marvel Avengers: Battle for Earth, Your Shape, Just Dance 4, and Rabbids Land. With the possible exception of Assassins creed III, none of those are huge games by any stretch, and therefore there €1m port cost is not indicative of normal port costs.

Secondly, a port is a game that's already finished elsewhere, and the process of porting involves copying the game assets across, recompiling and optimsing the game engine, qa and release. Most of the time and cost of a game is in the creation off all the game assets, the artwork, music, graphics. Poets are cheaper because they leverage already developed game assets.

Watch dogs Wii u isn't a port. It was developed concurrently with the other platforms, therefore the costs of developing the game assets is spread across all platforms including the Wii u. Therefore there is no way you can say it's approraching profitability on 25k preorders. 

Lastly, if a game sells for $40 , Ubisoft is lucky to get half that. Nintendo take a cut, the retailer takes a cut, packaging costs money. Ubi might see half that. same goes if the game sells for $60. 

It's largely built from the assets used the 360 and PS3 versions. You're basically spreading fixed costs of design and development to another platform. They're basically waiting to finish the 360 and PS3 versions to complete the port of the game. That's why there is a delay.

Fair point on additional costs. But even once you include additional costs, there's enough money on the table for Ubi to at least break even. Assuming they get a little less than half of the revenue -- that's about 2.5-3 million in gross revenue. And that's all only at 150k -- the total sales for such a game mature in the range between 200 - 400k.

How am I wrong Zero? If a developer is producing a game that costs $30 million to make and its released on 3 platforms, is that cost not amortised over the sales across all three platforms, and therefore whether a game on a particular platform is profitable is determined by whether it covered its portion of the cost (namely 10 million)? The platform specific work is only a small portion of the overall budget, but that shared cost still needs to be covered by all platforms. 

If hypothetically a game was released on PS4 and XB1 that cost $20million, and the PS4 version made $15 million and the XB1 version $5million, would it be fair to go 'well the cost of compiling and QA'ing the XB1 specific code cost $2million, so yay XB1 version was profitable', lumping the remaining $18 million on the PS4 to make up the costs for developing the shared graphics, artwork, music, story writing, etc? No it wouldn't, because each version needs to pay for its own contribution of the total development cost. 

Now, its different if its an actual port where the game was completed on another platform, and at a later date it was recompiled and QA'd for a new platform. In that case the shared development has already been paid for, so the only cost is the platform specific work. However in Watch Dogs case, the Wii U version was developed in step with the other platforms until recently, so it needs to cover some of the shared development cost. From Ubisoft's statement, it sounds like Watch Dogs is getting more Wii U specific design and programming, so its likely that its costs will be higher. 

Ah... it was announced today. I hadn't seen that yet. Still not a big deal to me. I still think Ubi saying 2014 is just purposefully not being specific as a PR line. We all know they had the team working on Wii U version help with other versions. Now that this work is nearing its end, they'll roll back and implement fixes they did to other versions. So end of May for others and likely end of summer for Wii U.