Not saying CrazzyMan is not being a troll, because he is, but Sony's 1st party efforts actually sell in the millions, not as good as Nintendo, but better than MS 1st party efforts for sure.

I am not saying that NPD is wrong or the VGC is right. To be honest, since we are talking about estimates, both are going to be wrong.

However, unless something has changed, NPD does not get data from two large sources of game sales -- Wal-Mart and Toys R Us.  And if you go in either of those chains, the Wii has the predominant display position -- which usually goes to the strongest item.

So it is quite within the realm of possibility that the methodology that NPD does not fully take into account sales at those places.  And people who swear that NPD is the end-all-to-be-all tend to forget that.

Remember, these are sales estimates.

Mike from Morgantown

Okay, I have some questions about these guesstimate numbers.

Dev cost for "a PS3/360 game" -- is that a crossplat title, or are we talking exclusives?  The dev cost for 360->PS3 or 360->PS3 ports is relatively (to the original cost) minor.

If we're talking crossplat devcosts, then... shouldn't we be combining the sales of the game, if we're comparing profitability for a HD crossplat, to profitability on the Wii (which has no cheap-port contemporaries, unless you consider the PS2 a contemporary).

The numbers presented above are arranged to compare HD games, with Wii games, as though they were all exclusives, which, largely, is not the case.  Sorry to ring the truth bell, to anyone who is offended by this statement.

Back directly OT:  Do we honestly believe The Conduit was an "average" cost-to-make Wii title?

Because you don't need a test kit or dev kit to develop and test DS games. I worked in the industry for years in QA and always used retail DSs to test code. PSP dev kits used to be bloody expensive, but Sony have recently decreased the price of dev kits for all of their consoles.

I bought it. Where the hell were the rest of you assholes that said you were going to buy it?

What matters most for VC is that it performed well enough, both critically and commercially to lock in a franchise future. We've already seen an anime series (not sure if this was pre-planned as a promotional strategy, or if the game actually came second to the series), and we already have confirmation of the next VC game on PSP.

At this point, whether it broke even or pulled a decent profit is somewhat irrelevant. The only thing that would potentially be changed based upon how well it profited would be expansion across other platforms in the future.

And while it's a bit unfortunate that half of the sales happened AFTER it went bargain price, Sega could have done a better job of having more copies available (launch seemed limited, but not surprising due to the limited niche genre), and maybe even made more of a token effort to market outside of the anime series released well after debut.

It may well be that the growing excellent word of mouth, good press and sudden discount all added up to huge sales post initial release from those who now had little reason not to buy the game. Personally, I bought a copy for the exact reason even though I wasn't in a position to actually play through the game at the time.

It wasn't the "assholes" on this site that didn't buy it; VGC is home to one of the bigger fanbases of HVS and the Conduit.

It was the other 50+ million "assholes" who own a Wii that just didn't care enough about this type of game to buy it.

^
Stop calling my grandma and grandpa assholes!

the question that remains- is

did the game tank?

the answer will not be known for several months and probably will not know until sega's quarterly report

if the game does a steady sales then it will make a profit. it took cod:waw several months (and people were saying THAT tanked in nov) to get to a million,

give it time, most wii owners are slow buyers- and hell june was a BUSY month,

tiger woods
GST
ghostbusters
overlord
etc...

lot of games to buy that month