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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Wii game budgets 1/4 of HD budgets according to EA

megaman79 on 04 February 2009

^clever, i dk clearly PS360 games were already in dev. stage



“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.

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puffy on 04 February 2009

@ rajendra82: The Wii is still a risk and until they have a wide variety of franchises that are sure fire hits on Wii such as MySims and perhaps the new EA Sports Active range, we won't see Wii being the lead console.

I think that another thing is that EA wouldn't want all their eggs in one basket and if you were an invester you'd understand that logic. Another worry for EA is oversaturation of the market. They don't want too much competion for their own titles..

Finally.. I believe that EA will spend more than just 1/3 of a HD game by spending more advertising dollars on Wii games. So really what they're doing all makes sense



 

NJ5 on 04 February 2009
Viper1 said:
NJ5 said:
Rather interesting considering we've had a supposed developer in this forum repeatedly telling up this is not true.

Exactly what came to my mind. I know we've both told him the art assets jack up the costs significantly.

 

I suppose he's going to tell us John is wrong?

 

 

On topic: Haven't we already known this since 2006?

Not just John but THQ, Polyphony Digital and Capcom... I'm not going to fetch the links now unless someone asks for them, but all those developers/publishers said HD development is more expensive. They just hadn't specifically said how much more, AFAIK.

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

Khuutra on 04 February 2009
NJ5 said:
Viper1 said:
NJ5 said:
Rather interesting considering we've had a supposed developer in this forum repeatedly telling up this is not true.

Exactly what came to my mind. I know we've both told him the art assets jack up the costs significantly.

 

I suppose he's going to tell us John is wrong?

 

 

On topic: Haven't we already known this since 2006?

Not just John but THQ, Polyphony Digital and Capcom... I'm not going to fetch the links now unless someone asks for them, but all those developers/publishers said HD development is more expensive. They just hadn't specifically said how much more, AFAIK.

Would this vary much from studio to studio?



ksv on 04 February 2009
puffy said:

To put this into some perspective for people.. The combined sales of Dead Space on PS3 and 360 adds up to 1.49 Million copies according to VGChartz (PC sales not avaliable) 

If Dead Space cost EA 1/3 on Wii than it did on the HD formats then it only needs to sell 500,000 - 600,000 to make the same money back.

 

 This is very flawed math. Very flawed. Your math is only correct if the break even point is 1.49 million sold on the PS360. After that, every next sold copy is profit, and if the price tag is $50, you make the same profit per copy regardless of system.

So, let's say the break even point for Dead Space on PS/360 was 1 million (just as an example). They broke even + got profit from additional 490K sales (how much, I dunno, 20 dollars?) Let's say 20, so that gives you about 9.8 million dollars in profit. (20 x 0.490)

Then let's take Wii, 1/3rd of production costs. Breaks even at 333 000 in sales (most likely need to sell a little more than 1/3rd of the break even point of the HD game, because printing costs for dvds, covers etc are still the same).

That means that the remain 167 000 in sales are profit. And again, let's say $20 in profit. That means $20x0.167 million = $3.34 million USD.

So, as you can clearly see, you need far more than 1/3rd of the sales to make the same amount of money, even if the production costs are only 1/3rd on Wii.

You DO need about 1/3rd at the break even point, but I think games are published in the hope of doing better than just breaking even.



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NJ5 on 04 February 2009
ksv said:
puffy said:

To put this into some perspective for people.. The combined sales of Dead Space on PS3 and 360 adds up to 1.49 Million copies according to VGChartz (PC sales not avaliable)

If Dead Space cost EA 1/3 on Wii than it did on the HD formats then it only needs to sell 500,000 - 600,000 to make the same money back.

 

This is very flawed math. Very flawed. Your math is only correct if the break even point is 1.49 million sold on the PS360. After that, every next sold copy is profit, and if the price tag is $50, you make the same profit per copy regardless of system.

So, let's say the break even point for Dead Space on PS/360 was 1 million (just as an example). They broke even + got profit from additional 490K sales (how much, I dunno, 20 dollars?) Let's say 20, so that gives you about 9.8 million dollars in profit. (20 x 0.490)

Then let's take Wii, 1/3rd of production costs. Breaks even at 333 000 in sales (most likely need to sell a little more than 1/3rd of the break even point of the HD game, because printing costs for dvds, covers etc are still the same).

That means that the remain 167 000 in sales are profit. And again, let's say $20 in profit. That means $20x0.167 million = $3.34 million USD.

So, as you can clearly see, you need far more than 1/3rd of the sales to make the same amount of money, even if the production costs are only 1/3rd on Wii.

You DO need about 1/3rd at the break even point, but I think games are published in the hope of doing better than just breaking even.

You have a good point, but regarding your last sentence I think that's only true for the more established franchises... The other ones are pretty much shots in the dark these days, and the ammo is quite expensive on PS3/360 games.

@Khuutra: I'd guess it won't vary that much, but who knows...

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

Kasz216 on 04 February 2009
kylohk said:
Wow, so graphics do make the budget.

Well... yeah Namco even once said HD graphics costed them like... 8 million dollars.

For Ridge Racer.

 



NJ5 on 04 February 2009
Kasz216 said:
kylohk said:
Wow, so graphics do make the budget.

Well... yeah Namco even once said HD graphics costed them like... 8 million dollars.

For Ridge Racer.

 

Just in case someone missed this gem from Polyphony Digital, here it goes:

"In GT and GT2, both for PS1, a designer spent a day to model a car. In GT3 and GT4, for PS2, the same worker spent a month modeling the same car due to the increased amount of polygons. In GT5 for PS3, they require six months to do the same job," Yamauchi explained.


It's hard to imagine programming costs rising that much... Yeah making all those nice graphical effects and shaders also takes more programming effort, but it wouldn't be necessary to have 100 (or even 10) times as many programmers. That would make projects impossible to manage, whereas artists can work in parallel much better.

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

Garnett on 04 February 2009
puffy said:
Another interesting bit of sales info:

CoD: WaW on Wii has sold between 600 - 900k according to different sources so anywhere between 2 - 3 million in direct apples to apples comparison to the HD games.

360 is at 4.7 Million
PS3 is at 2.77 Million

CoD: WaW on Wii is actually doing quite nicely

 

No its not,its doing awful really,for a install base of what? 45 million this game hasnt even sold a million copies yet? Lmao they cant ignore the install base but they install base can ignore them.



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puffy on 04 February 2009
ksv said:
puffy said:

To put this into some perspective for people.. The combined sales of Dead Space on PS3 and 360 adds up to 1.49 Million copies according to VGChartz (PC sales not avaliable) 

If Dead Space cost EA 1/3 on Wii than it did on the HD formats then it only needs to sell 500,000 - 600,000 to make the same money back.

 

 This is very flawed math. Very flawed. Your math is only correct if the break even point is 1.49 million sold on the PS360. After that, every next sold copy is profit, and if the price tag is $50, you make the same profit per copy regardless of system.

So, let's say the break even point for Dead Space on PS/360 was 1 million (just as an example). They broke even + got profit from additional 490K sales (how much, I dunno, 20 dollars?) Let's say 20, so that gives you about 9.8 million dollars in profit. (20 x 0.490)

Then let's take Wii, 1/3rd of production costs. Breaks even at 333 000 in sales (most likely need to sell a little more than 1/3rd of the break even point of the HD game, because printing costs for dvds, covers etc are still the same).

That means that the remain 167 000 in sales are profit. And again, let's say $20 in profit. That means $20x0.167 million = $3.34 million USD.

So, as you can clearly see, you need far more than 1/3rd of the sales to make the same amount of money, even if the production costs are only 1/3rd on Wii.

You DO need about 1/3rd at the break even point, but I think games are published in the hope of doing better than just breaking even.

 

Yes I thought about that.. but got lazy :P

You do have very flawed logic in that line right there where you say "So, as" ... OMG I'll bbl my cat just caught fire!