Tales of Symphonia, Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe, and many more.

Or it shows that a 5-10 mil budget game can produce an extra 20 mil in profits. At the end of the day, its all about profit margin, not units sold, user base, or anything else. Its all about the cash.

I'd be interested to know the profit margin for each of the HD systems and see which version of the 3 games had the smallest profit margin.

Great sales! Wii got a inferior version, with userbase that did not play CoD4 before it sells a million and probably will continue to sell. Great result for CoD and for the Wii.

1. SD graphics.
2. Fewer multiplayer modes.
3. Fewer mulitplayer maps.
4. Fewer simultaneous online players.
5. No zombies.
6. Friend codes.
7. Very little direct marketing.
8. Very little retail support.
9. Previous CoD iteration was horrible.
10. No CoD4 to build fan base on.


Still sells 1 million units.

I doubt that 1 million is the end of this story; I think this game is just hitting its stride.

After a very slow start, now after 4 months it is currently #43 in overall sales and #13 for the Wii and selling at a rate of over 100K a month. It may have sold " just a fraction of the HD versions" but it is now selling at a rate just 13% less than PS3, and 37% less than Xbox360. It is now selling around twice as fast as RRR: TV Party and Shaun White Snowboarding, two very successful platinum sellers that launched at the same time and only 10% less than 1^st party powerhouse Animal Crossing that launched one week earlier.

I'm feeling pretty comfortable with my my prediction that it'll sell 2 million by the end of 2009.

The thing is that profit margin does not really shows how well a paticular game performed. What gives us a better idea of the performance of a game is how many dollars earned for each dollar spent.

I have read in various places that a x360/ps3 game costs around 30 million dollars to produce, while a wii game costs around 5 million (correct me if i'm wrong)

So let's do the math:

x360:

5 million copies of waw sold -> 5 million x 60 dollars = 300 million dollars.

300 million - 30 million of costs = 270 million of profit

270 million of profits / 30 million of spendings = 9 dollars for each dollar spent.

wii:

1 million copies of waw sold -> 1 millions x 50 dollars = 50 million dollars.

50 million - 5 million of costs = 45 million of profits

45 million of profits / 5 million of costs = 9 dollars for each dollar spent!!

So that means, WaW on the wii was as lucrative as WaW was of the xbox 360, even if on the wii it has sold only 1 million copies. (I know my calculations are a little rough, but is should not be that far of real facts.)

No they don't. Red Steel cost more than Gears of War.

There are quite a few problems with your math, although I agree that both versions probably look pretty damn good to Actiblizz in terms or return on investment. Here are some things to keep in mind in the future.

First, you're about 50%-100% too high on your average cost to develop an HD game. CoD: WaW may have cost $30 million, perhaps even more, but average HD costs are usually though to be about $20 million. Averages don't tell the whole story either, since you have outliers in the form of cheap shovelware and mega blockbusters. You have to try to keep the quality of the project in mind when you estimate the production cost.

Second, those development costs don't come anywhere close to representing the full cost of putting these games up on the market. You can add in advertising, the cost of printing and shipping copies, distribution and retail. Lots of different companies get a slice of that $60 from a retail sale. The breakdown is poorly understood and varies depending on a lot of factors, but the retailer gets a big chunk (30-50%), distributor gets a tiny piece (~5%), disc manufacturer gets another tiny piece, the console manufacturer gets a licensing fee. The publisher will be left with something less than 50% of the sticker price, which will first go to pay for marketing and development, then surplus will go to publisher profit and perhaps developer royalties if the game was successful enough.

So basically trying to calculate exactly how much any given game made is close to impossible without access to confidential cost information. It's all guesswork on our part.

And finally, welcome to the 'Chartz. If you stick around, I'm sure you'll learn a lot.

There are others, but the point is to not use absolute numbers. Not all Wii games are cheaper than HD games. They just aren't.

Well, outside of Super Mario Galaxy, we haven't had a big budget that's released that really had great production values.

I'm interested in the costs of The Conduit and MH3. Both should be well over 20 million.