Ouch. It did look like a game with good production values, and an interesting concept. It was never going to be a widely appealing game though, and they absolutely bet the farm on it. I was thinking about it, but I hate buying single player Wii games unless they're really good.

All in all, quite sad.

Hard to say what part of the shortfall has to do with management, but the basic numbers I'm seeing from this example is that 90k units sold with a development team of 20 personnel over (don't know the development time) a presumed 1-2 years is not enough to keep a development studio in business developing for the Wii. Unless they actually started development in 2006, which would go a long way in explaining the shortfall.

Of course one has to take into account that it was a new studio, with no prior releases which meant going through the lengthy process of setting up all resources and libraries using teams that presumably had little or no former experience working together.

The most unfortunate part is that stories like this do not bode well for small studios making attempts to produce unique, smaller niche titles, which means higher odds of seeing low cost party titles and fewer games like Cursed Mountain.

Ah, that's sad...
Too bad, really, I guess for their first game they should've tried something that would've appealed to a wider audience.

The project was actually a collaboration between a number of small studios. They did a GDC talk about it. So it was much more than those 20 people.

I don't think anyone has ever argued that <100,000 sales would be enough for a Wii game, unless it's shovelware or just a very small budget.

aww, too bad. One of the best horror games I've played. Fixed my Resident Evil need, since Resident Evil 5 couldn't do that.

PS:

The game DID have some advertising, at least here in Germany. I've seen several ads on TV.

Yes, it was apparently much more than 20 people -

"GC 2009: 12 Companies Made Cursed Mountain
To be precise: 236 people and 16 companies across 14 countries and 17 unique locations."

http://wii.ign.com/articles/101/1014390p1.html

I assume all the other companies/people were outsourced to.

@SIlver-Tiger:  yes it was advertised a bit in some EU countries, hence the better sales there than in NA (Others with some advertising 70k, NA with no advertising 20k). Just stating the facts, not blaming them, advertising probably wouldn't have put them in the black in this case.

Really sad...for their first game it was very good and I was looking forward to the next games.

I quess that for Austrian developer's it is even harder to exist.

Yes there was some advertising in Austria and Germany but I believe not in the rest of the world.

I would say @ $20 per full priced title, $100,000 per developer per year, they would need ~5,000 full price sales per developer per year to cover the expenses. So over 20 people thats 5k * 2 * 20 = 200,000 copies. With a rough allocation given to marketing. Every 100,000 copies printed of a console game would cost about $8-10 per copy or about a million per 100,000 to distribute and sell. So next to the development budget, these small titles also must worry about printing the correct number of copies. Printing too many is an expensive exercise.

I suspect what this mean is that small studios which work on online games, see Behemoth for example on Xbox Live can make a lot more money due to stable development and fewer distribution costs. I just find it difficult for anything but a well placed development studio to be able to do physical media distribution on consoles.

It did have some advertising, I remember seeing that awesome front cover everywhere.

I can't fathom why this would only sell 90k, on such a huge userbase ... shops simply didn't stock it I assume?

Sad to see as I really liked the concept and look of this game. Would have loved to see their next effort. Guilty of not getting Cursed Mountain though, if only it was a better game too.