I'm still primarily jus depressed that the game didn't do better. It really did deserve to be played by more people.

Let's assume Sven is right and Capcom only sold 300k to retailers. At about $20 for the publisher, that should be around $6 million in revenue. Factor in the $2 million dollar ad campaign in Japan and pretty much no advertising anywhere else, and that means this game cost at least $4 million to make.

If advertising is 9-12% of gross sales as he claims, lets see what they were planning on selling in Japan. I'll use 10% for ease. That means they were planning on $20 million on gross sales in Japan alone. At $50 dollars a game, that means they were planning on selling 400,000 units in Japan alone.

If they were expecting 400k in Japan, what does that mean they were expecting in America? Europe and others? It sounds to me like Capcom was expecting at least 1 million units sold worldwide.

Games like No More Heroes and de Blob were already declared financial successes at around 300k or so. There is a confirmed sequel for No More Heroes, and THQ is talking about a sequel for de Blob if I'm not mistaken.

All this leads up to the conclusion that Capcom vastly overestimated the demand for this game. It sounds like too much money was spent on development, and too much was spend on the ad campaign in Japan.

So many myths have been killed this week.

Anyway the biggest question is a lot a wii and Ps3 games get tons of their sales over a long period of times, legs as we call them, now is it better to have long legs and sell 1 million or sell a 1 million in a month and die off like MGS4?

I don't find it that hard to beleive.

 Capcom invested alot into that franchise, but where is it now? Nowhere, because it lost money. If it was profitable we'd have another title in the series, especially with how the Wii is selling at the moment.

 Sequels don't mean the first title made profit, it can just point to strong sales in the first title, but most likely not enough to outweight marketing and dev costs. Every company dreams of having IP's with enough brand recognition to sell big without a huge marketing budget and a game developed from previous middleware, using previous game resources etc, and investing enough money to surpass early losses is part of the parcel.

 While I think Viewtiful Joe sold good sales numbers to justify sequels and keep Capcom investing in it, ultimately it didn't take off how they expected and they had to drop the axe on it eventually.

 What then, do you propose, would justify a sequel? Because the executives think it is a super neat idea? Z&W and Okami were both viewed very favorably by the company and look at where they are now. The game didn't get various sequels and spin-offs by hemoraging money at every turn. The series ultimately started to lose money yes, but thats when it was canned. It makes zero sense for Capcom to make a fighting game based on a failing IP. There is simply no logical explanation.

As theRepublic mentioned, if they lost money on selling a MINIMUM of 300k units, then they stuffed up. The revenue from 300k units should be around $15m gross and if they got around $20-25 as their cut from the game then they should have managed to bring in $6-7.5million to Capcom.

Considering Gears of War cost $10m to make, I would suggest the only reason they may have lost money on the title was because they spent $2m in Japan on advertising. Which in hindsight was the wrong market to spend all that money. They would have been better using that $2m to try and get the title on shelves worldwide, it's impossible to find.

 The MGS option is no doubt the best, once a game stops selling at full retail price you can write off profits for the most part. Maybe a bit extreme, but I'm not sure it is.

 The problem is at retail I think, they just don't dare put faith in ANY third party Wii software, and outside of the xmas rush that's going to hurt published. It's not retails fault though, becuase I'm sure they're getting tons of junk that doesn't sell at all from the Wii, and how can they tell what will sell at all and what wil be a wasted investment?

 Third parties will eventually find a way round this 'obstical' I've no doubt, companies like EA and Activision are the behemoths they are today for exactly that reason. It's never going to be the goldmine Nintendo have made for themselves though, in my opinion, but equally I guess it shouldn't be.

So it does. I guess I did misread it completely. Odd that they spent that much in just one region, and evidently near-nil everywhere else, but c'est la vie. My apologies.

Just for reference, and going off Svensson's suggestion that they expected Zack & Wiki to sell at least 400k units in Japan, here is the number of games which have sold that amount for several consoles:

Wii - 14

PS3 - 4

360 - 0

PS2 - 78

It's really impossible to say without a solid idea of figures and costs and everything else. Say the first title lost money, I'd say a sequel would be justified if the revenue generated by the first game outweights the expected reduced costs of a sequel, considering you'd expect a smaller dev and marketing budget.

 But we don't know, we've not got anywhere near the figures to even begin to contemplate why Viewtiful Joe had sequels and everything. My gut feeling says it was just CApcom felt if they kept pushing the IP they could get more out of it, eventually, but it didn't work out in the end, neither of us can really say whether that was close to the truth or not, or what any other sequence of events could suggest.

  It'd be great to get more incite into the minds of these companies to be honest, in my opinion most people are too 'generous' with how profitable video games are, but as I say, we need more incite.