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Forums - Nintendo - XSEED talks about sales and new titles

student on 23 June 2009

Man, I am ready for Little King's Story. I relaly hope that game does well.



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theRepublic on 23 June 2009

Ignore



Switch Code: SW-7377-9189-3397 -- Nintendo Network ID: theRepublic -- Steam ID: theRepublic

Now Playing
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theRepublic on 23 June 2009
moondeep said:
So does anyone know a typical count of man-hours used on these smaller Wii games? I was just throwing out some numbers I considered somewhat plausible, but I'd love to find out some hard data. If the Wii is supposed to be so easy to program for, then you'd think that some of these games could get by with very few people involved.

It is a lot easier to find info on the bigger games, so I don't really know.  Someone could count the names in the credits (I don't have the game yet so I can't) to give us one thing we need.  Then we have to find an article or an interview to find out when development started.  That is probably going to be much harder.  Even for big games that can be hard to find.  Most of the time you have to make a guess based on other games the developer has made, or when the first videos were shown.

For Neverland, the developer, the games they have made recently look like this:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/company/72872.html

2004
PlayStation 2 Spectral Force: Radical Elements 09/16/04
2005
PlayStation 2 Shining Force Neo 03/24/05
PSP Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory 04/26/05
PlayStation 2 Shinten Makai: Generation Of Chaos V 07/21/05
2006
PSP Rengoku II: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N. 04/27/06
2007
PlayStation 2 Shining Force Exa 01/18/07
DS Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon 08/14/07
2008
DS Rune Factory 2: A Fantasy Harvest Moon 01/03/08
DS Dramatic Dungeon: Sakura Taisen - Kimi Arugatame 03/19/08
Wii Rune Factory Frontier 11/27/08

(Sorry for the formatting)

Tough to say when development for RFF started, but I would say development was 22 months at most.



Switch Code: SW-7377-9189-3397 -- Nintendo Network ID: theRepublic -- Steam ID: theRepublic

Now Playing
Switch - Super Mario Maker 2 (2019)
3DS - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (Trilogy) (2005/2014)
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Mobile - Super Mario Run (2017)
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PC - Deep Rock Galactic (2020)

griffinA on 23 June 2009

I'm going to go ahead and guess that the mystery wii game is Takt of Magic. Just a hunch.



"Pier was a chef, a gifted and respected chef who made millions selling his dishes to the residents of New York City and Boston, he even had a famous jingle playing in those cities that everyone knew by heart. He also had a restaurant in Los Angeles, but not expecting LA to have such a massive population he only used his name on that restaurant and left it to his least capable and cheapest chefs. While his New York restaurant sold kobe beef for $100 and his Boston restaurant sold lobster for $50, his LA restaurant sold cheap hotdogs for $30. Initially these hot dogs sold fairly well because residents of los angeles were starving for good food and hoped that the famous name would denote a high quality, but most were disappointed with what they ate. Seeing the success of his cheap hot dogs in LA, Pier thought "why bother giving Los Angeles quality meats when I can oversell them on cheap hotdogs forever, and since I don't care about the product anyways, why bother advertising them? So Pier continued to only sell cheap hotdogs in LA and was surprised to see that they no longer sold. Pier's conclusion? Residents of Los Angeles don't like food."

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Kasz216 on 23 June 2009
outlawauron said:
moondeep said:
Everyone's talking about the sales and what's profitable, but I'd like to see an analysis of what's typically required (in man-hours) for a game like Rune Factory. For example, if it takes a team of 20 people (counting 10 programmers, 4 artists, 3 musicians, 2 play-testers, and 1 project lead) about 1 year to develop a game from scratch, then that's roughly 41,600 man-hours (40x52x20). If you figure an average pay rate of $30/hr, then that's around $1.25M for the total labor involved, but without distribution and manufacturing costs. I would think you'd be able to make most smaller niche Wii games for around $1.5M or so. If that's the case, then you'd only need 71,428 copies of the game sold (at a profit of $21 per unit) to break even. Thus, it seems plausible to me that their target was to sell over 75K units.

Yet I doubt they only had 20 people and the pay can be a great variable.

I dunno that's about what LBP had right?  With some games it's as easy as setting a system in play and letting the system do the work for you.

Look at Borderlands.

That game had 500,000 guns and E3 08.  A later interview plugged it at 650,000 with the addition of alien technology.... and E3 09 they said they lost count... and were now in the millions somewhere.

The problem is.... very few companies work smart.

Well that and it's often hard to get games to work like that.  Larely depends how differing it is.



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Skorpion on 23 June 2009

Damn is Rune Factory really that good? How does it compare to the first one on DS?



outlawauron on 23 June 2009
Kasz216 said:
outlawauron said:
moondeep said:
Everyone's talking about the sales and what's profitable, but I'd like to see an analysis of what's typically required (in man-hours) for a game like Rune Factory. For example, if it takes a team of 20 people (counting 10 programmers, 4 artists, 3 musicians, 2 play-testers, and 1 project lead) about 1 year to develop a game from scratch, then that's roughly 41,600 man-hours (40x52x20). If you figure an average pay rate of $30/hr, then that's around $1.25M for the total labor involved, but without distribution and manufacturing costs. I would think you'd be able to make most smaller niche Wii games for around $1.5M or so. If that's the case, then you'd only need 71,428 copies of the game sold (at a profit of $21 per unit) to break even. Thus, it seems plausible to me that their target was to sell over 75K units.

Yet I doubt they only had 20 people and the pay can be a great variable.

I dunno that's about what LBP had right?  With some games it's as easy as setting a system in play and letting the system do the work for you.

Look at Borderlands.

That game had 500,000 guns and E3 08.  A later interview plugged it at 650,000 with the addition of alien technology.... and E3 09 they said they lost count... and were now in the millions somewhere.

The problem is.... very few companies work smart.

Well that and it's often hard to get games to work like that.  Larely depends how differing it is.

I believe LBP had 35-40. You're the team can be small, but I don't hear of many non-indy games with that small of a dev team.



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peachbuggy on 23 June 2009

Get little kings story when it comes out! It's an amazing game and really needs the love!



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Daileon on 23 June 2009
griffinA said:
I'm going to go ahead and guess that the mystery wii game is Takt of Magic. Just a hunch.

I would prefer a "Sky Crawlers" instead...



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ash3336 on 23 June 2009

Amazing dev/pub that has failure in sales due to lack of advertising.

Biggest example is Little King's Story.



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