You would think developing for the Wii would have saved them............Nintendo does say it gives "opportunity", for obvious reasons.

Just so everyone knows, this is the publisher that is going under. The developer, Sproing, is doing fine. I eMailed them to confirm this.

Kinda a foregone conclusion, sadly enough. It was a good game (from what i've heard, anyway), but obscure to the max.

Good to know.  Thanks for that.  Still it's nice to have a publisher that would take a chance on such a title.  Too bad the market wouldn't.

Kinda shows that if a studio depends on a single title's performance then it can fold regardless if it's on PS3, 360, or Wii.

The biggest problem for this game was marketing.. IE there was none to speak of... a lot of people don't take into fact that a lot of hardcore games actually are mainstream... example modernwarefare is very mainstream everyone knows about it even if there not into gaming... but yeah nintendo needs to do more with third parties like example of the nintendo world launch event for games... GREAT IDEA... but they should really do that everymonth for the hardcore... it would really help third parties and them out

dolemit3,

tehsage stated that he emailed the developer and they are not going under. The publisher of Cursed Mountain is.

tehsage, I think you should start a thread stating that the publisher is the one that is going under not the developer.

this is actually old news then.,.. cause I heard a story about this back in like sep when they came out... that the publisher went under...

Admittedly I wasn't exactly on mission to find a copy of the game, but I don't recall seeing it on shelves anywhere.

For retailers like Target, major distributers that they be, they have relatively low shelf space for games for each system and tend to keep their orders limited to what their buyers presumably think will sell and generally don't stock old games at all unless they're proven consistent sellers. They dump a lot of older inventory at slashed prices on a regular basis once they stop ordering the title. 

The thing is, even if retailers ordered in low numbers, there still has to be a significant number of units produced that were never shipped in order for the game to be a studio closing underperformer. It's currently $20 on Amazon; I'm assuming it was $50 upon release, which essentially means Amazon is dumping stock. Conduit's currently going for $17.

Limited to no marketing, unknown developer, small niche title developed for a platform with a majorty user base that has shown minimal interest in said niche all go a long way in explaining the sales.

Someone already worked out a similar formula to estimate what a given title for a given platform would have to sell in order to break even. It wasn't exactly science, but better than outright guessing.

People are claiming there were a lot more developers involved in the creation of the game which only means more hours went into it, making it an even bigger negative ROI. The only saving grace was the apparent lack of any marketing dollars spent.

I'm increasingly convinced that new developers and small studios would be better off starting with DD games as a first effort to avoid losses on inventory production (particularly overproduction) and disto costs. While you are greatly limiting your potential userbase (vast majority of console game sales are still physical media sold via retail by a landslide), it takes a lot of the risk out of a project, increasing odds of future titles.