PopCap Wins Big With Plants vs. Zombies

[Lord_Jaroh]

With most development budgets these days, a game needs to break 1 million copies sold - minimum - to be successful. You can have a great game that only sells 500,000 - by most definitions a success - but it won't recoup development costs. Even excellent games sometimes don't reach that.

Aren't you applying a Halo/Killzone/GTA4 budget across the board when in reality only 1% of games will cost anywhere near that amount?

I can't imagine games like LittleBigPlanet, Left 4 Dead, Mario Galaxy or Chinatown Wars costing $50m+ but all of them are huge titles for their respective systems.

Second-tier exclusives like Siren, Disgaea 3, Crackdown, No More Heroes etc. will probably cost even less. They must do, or else they wouldn't keep appearing.

Then you have publishers like Atlus who continue to put out niche games to mediocre critical reception and dire sales year after year. And I haven't even mentioned downloadable games (which are more popular than ever). Or the massive volume of shovelware for most systems.

Sorry but I just don't believe that "most development budgets" require more than a million sales for the developer to break even.

It was actually part of a very good keynote by Peter Tamte of Atomic at TGC - I can't remember all the numbers cited exactly, unfortunately. You assume that of every game sold, $50-60 goes into the developers' pockets? Not at all. You have retailer fees, production costs (though very marginal), marketing costs, publisher fees, distribution costs (again relatively marginal), etc. Hell, a lot of times just marketing for a game is a HUGE chunk of the budget.

Especially with development times and expenses being what they are in the HD era, multimillion dollar games are becoming more and more common, and they simply aren't recouping investments.

That's because they are simply recycling in most cases, rather than coming out with their own game, whether that be recycling a series to the next iteration (Guitar Hero), or recycling an idea (FPS) without bringing anything new to the table. Less people are becoming interested in more of the same. They'll stick with what they have already. It's why every game that tries to copy WoW's success invariably fails, because everyone that likes WoW's formula already plays/played WoW and they don't want to do it again.

Come out with more new ideas, and fix this dumping money into a lost cause mentality. Otherwise, the only games that will make money are those that cost nothing to make.

 

[Miral]

I played the demo of this -- the 60 minutes just went like lightning. Thus far I've managed to resist actually buying it (I don't have enough free time as it is, without having more of it just vanish inexplicably), but it's really really hard not to.

 

[oliveira8]

I do wonder why PopCap allowed Steam to undercut their price by half ($10 vs. $20 that they offer on their site). It's mostly annoying because I want to purchase the Mac version.

To piss of Mac users obviously. It seems to work so far. ^^

 

[oliveira8]

With most development budgets these days, a game needs to break 1 million copies sold - minimum - to be successful. You can have a great game that only sells 500,000 - by most definitions a success - but it won't recoup development costs. Even excellent games sometimes don't reach that.

Aren't you applying a Halo/Killzone/GTA4 budget across the board when in reality only 1% of games will cost anywhere near that amount?

I can't imagine games like LittleBigPlanet, Left 4 Dead, Mario Galaxy or Chinatown Wars costing $50m+ but all of them are huge titles for their respective systems.

Didn't Valve spend around $10 million only on advertisement for L4D?

Edit:Bah sorry for double post...

 

[mythbuster343]

I'd love to see Yahtzee take a look at this ^_^

Great game

If he gets his hands on this, its gonna be like portal.


Or he'll nit-pick and make every little fault look like a giant hole in the side of the Empire State Building.


Heres hoping for the first one

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Act now. I'm CRAAAAAAAAZY!

Bonus cookies for Mustache mode, Alien mode, the hidden zombie (I know where it is(!)) and most of Crazy Dave's speech.

 

[Eric the Orange]

I have a question to anyone who may know. When you get your wisdom tree to a certian hight it says it's out of wisdom but may have more if you grow it higher. I grew it to 100 and it gave me one more peice of wisdom, but then said it may have more. How high do you have to get it befor it runs out?

 

[SharPhoe]

I, for one, blame the super-catchy advertising for this monumental success.
"There's a zombie on your la~awn..."

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

I have a question to anyone who may know. When you get your wisdom tree to a certian hight it says it's out of wisdom but may have more if you grow it higher. I grew it to 100 and it gave me one more peice of wisdom, but then said it may have more. How high do you have to get it befor it runs out?

I'm not sure. I think for every 100 you get a new "cheat" - like "Daisies" and Pinata mode.

 

[The Shade]

Act now. I'm CRAAAAAAAAZY!

Bonus cookies for Mustache mode, Alien mode, the hidden zombie (I know where it is(!)) and most of Crazy Dave's speech.

You...you feeling all right there, Mike?

 

[coldfrog]

If that's a screenshot of your game Funk, I feel sorry, that zombie is SO about to eat your brains. You might be able to get one Squash up in time... but that second row is in big trouble.

Also, I really loved the game, but I found it, for the most part, far too easy. The only thing that ever really gave me a real challenge was the invisible zombies minigame. However, I love that final level so much I could do it over and over! (and I do)