http://www.edge-online.com/news/capcom-ups-full-year-forecast-game-sales

They were happy with it's sales back then. Did it slip off and have no legs?

Sounds more like production/cost issues on Capcom's side. No More Heroes make a profit on 390k (assuming so, because they have a sequel in the works) and yet Zack and Wiki sells over 500k and doesn't pull a profit? Something is wrong here.

What the fuck? Wasn't Dead Rising a cool new original game that made money?



*head explodes*

Yeah, benga should bring that up on the Capcom's board, just so we can be clear on if the game was not profitable, or just not profitable enough.

1. That would only be fanboys if they just made it up. Capcom had previously stated they were happy with the game's sales. See the above link.

2. What the hell makes Sony or Microsoft fanboys less untrustworthy? They lie and twist facts just as much.

I think that the "ways of" comment was about the USD 20 of profit per copy... Zack & Wiki have sold loads when it reached the USD 20 pricepoint, so Capcom may have made USD 5 per unit at that point, so I think that it's safe to assume that the profit is about USD 10 per unit.

Liked. Capcom, make it happen.

Capcom has a terrible business strategy if Zack & Wiki and Okami really didn't make a profit.

In february 2008, Capcom stated Zack & Wiki sold well. So selling well means still losing money? Ouch for Capcom's business strategy.

Zack & Wiki has now sold over 500.000 units, 90% of them at 50 dollars/euro's. 95% of the similar games that reached that number, made a healthy profit (De Blob, No More Heroes, Boom Blox), as it's been stated numerous times by publishers and analysts.

500k for a low budget niche game should rake in a good profit. It looks like Capcom spent over 10 million dollars making Zack & Wiki. You can probably make 2 times No More Heroes and 2 times De Blob combined with that amount of money. Obviously, Capcom has a terrible business strategy.

The unability of Capcom to make any money with Zack & Wiki selling over 500k units within a year is telling. Capcom is lost.

Okami was selling "along expectations", and it's on track to outsell the PS2 version. The Wii version is obviously a port, and it couldn't have cost much money at all. Still, it failed to make Capcom any money.

Conclusion: Capcom has a terrible business strategy and is unable to make any money even though all other publishers are able to with similar products and similar sales. Capcom is extremely inefficient.

I think the problem for Zack and Wiki was retail snubbed it, hard. When it launched with the whole buy zack and wiki campaign and everythign people were complaining they couldn't find the thing, it was nowhere. Sure retailers picked up on it but with an iffy reception to begin with I doubt it held a high retail price.

Once you factor out retail cuts, royalties, production costs etc, selling a game at cut prices isn't going to give you much money. My guess is that most of those 500k sales were at severely slashed prices, I just can't imagine how else the game didn't make money. Zack and Wiki started with a budget ($40?) price anyway didn't it?

I'm not sure about No More Heroes but de Blob sold at full retail price for it's sales, thanks to the Christmas rush. Another example - Haze is heading to a million but most of those sales are at drastically cut retail prices. With the recession and whatnot retailers are getting more and more stringy with how many games they order, there was an article on that recently too.

But yeah, on the capcom-unity site someone asked about this and although Sven couldn't give a proper answer due to investor contracts etc, he said the persons figures were 'way off'. Link:

http://www.capcom-unity.com/ask_capcom/go/thread/view/7371/13078821/Zack__Wiki_didnt_make_money

Yeah, I posted too on that site (same as my post here but heavily modified so I wouldn't get banned lol).