invetedlotus123 said:
But a game can sell much on first 6 weeks and keep selling for a very long time. I mean, you are giving an example for 2 years. But the game can hold legs for much more time. If i`m not mistaken the first StarCraft only sold one million in it`s first year and 10 years later it was still selling steadily. Blizzard games tend to be extreme long tails games, and a extreme long tail might be nice too. There were also the case of those brain training series that sold like 30 k on first week and managed to amount 15 million after many years. |
Ok, lets take your same example.
Don't you think the starcraft devs would have preferred to sell 8M copies in their first year and STILL also sold however many more copies they could have sold over the next 10yrs?
It's he same thing, fact remains that a game is at its costliest within the fiest 3 months on the market. Selling as much as possible during that time is what every publisher would want.
Mind you, in my example, I didn't say that because a game sold well in its first 6 weeks it would stop selling after 1yr. Just looking at GTA5. Trust me, every single publisher on the planet will deal with the devil to have a game that sold that well in its opening month and then still went on to sell as much as it did 3yrs after that.
Here is another thing to consider..... If a game cost $60M to make (including marketing), and it takes one year to sell 1M copies at an average price of $40 (yes cause that $60 start price won't remain there for more than 6-8 weeks at best). it means after one year they made only $40M. You think that company will be fixing to make a sequel or even invest in a new project?
