Dragonbums said:
EvilRoy said:
They aren't trying to wait to compete with Nintendo, they're trying to wait for Nintendo to be ready for them.
What does that even really mean? If they are just talking about the fanbase, shoot man, Wii U still beats Xbox One. How long it took to get to that point is irrelevant.
What is being "ready" for them? The big three have made bad sales predictions all the time. PS3 was a fucking mess. Didn't stop devs from ignoring bad first 3 year sales, wacky hardware programming, and little install base to make great games for it.
Yes, but historically Nintendo consoles have a very low attachment rate for third party games. So in order for an Ubisoft WU game to do as well as it would on the X or P, they need way more WU consoles out there than X or Ps.
The idea is that when Ubisoft decided they wanted to design a game for the WU, they had to figure out how much money to spend on it. So they had to guess at how many WU there would be when the game was ready for release. If they trusted Nintendos estimations, and budgeted for that assuming say 15% penetration to make the math easy, then Ubisoft budgeted for a game that would hopefully sell around 1.5 million copies.
So what, Nintendo is supposed to sell the game for them now? They already made and finished the game. Currently they are getting
Zero return on this game. Nothing, Zelch, nada. A complete full zero. All because they may or may not make a million sales on the system? You want it that bad then your going to have to advertise the game. We all know for a fact that Mario Kart 8 wouldn't of made the sales it did if they didn't whore off the game in advertising on every facet of the internet and television. It would mean fuck all if Nintendo had 20 million owners. If you half ass the advertisement you get half assed sales.
True they aren't MAKING money on the game now, but they aren't LOSING it either. And that's the issue. If they released a game right now that is guaranteed not to make their sales prediction, all they are doing is losing money. Worse yet, physical copies and marketing cost money too, so if they market it way more to try to increase penetration and they ship millions of copies and still don't meet original sales predictions then they would have lost more money than if they would never have released the game at all.
But then it turned out that Nintendo was really wrong, and only sold about 3 million WU (easy math again). So now instead of needing to make 15% market penetration to meet their projections, Ubisoft has to make 50% market penetration to meet projections. That is crazy. The only games that come close to 50% penetration on Nintendo consoles are huge first party titles like MK8 and SB. So in order for Ubisoft to make its money back, they would need to make a game that sells better than a first party Nintendo game on a Nintendo console. They flat out know this isn't going to happen, ever, so they're going to wait until projected sales are achievable. It doesn't hurt them to do it, games don't spoil over time.
In those scenarios you would then want to get a high attachment rate. I have no doubt that as more Wii U's are sold the attachment rate for MK8 will rise as well. It's already a must have game if your going to have a Wii U. Then again with todays' industry it's all about blowing your whole load on graphics that do fuck all for gameplay quality, and then whining about how many games they have to sell for cost returns. They too could also try for the slow but stead attach rate method. But you know...they can just let the game sit there and collect dust.
Right, you do want a high attachment rate. But attachment rate is really hard to change for a given game, since it is actually limited by genera, marketing, age range and so forth - some things that you can change and others that are basically intrinsic to the game itself. Put simply, a point and click adventure game, aimed at 50 year olds and released on the P, will never be able to attach at the same rate as a FPS, aimed at 20 years old and released on the same, no matter how much you market.
So rather than expend untold resources to raise the attachment rate from 15% to 50%, it is way more cost effective to wait until an attachment rate of 15% yields the preferred sales predictions.
I'm pretty sure 3 years later when nobody gives a shit about this game anymore they will decide "Nintendo is ready for it."
Exactly. If they released the game now, by the time there are actually enough consoles around to produce the desired sales it wouldn't matter because everyone will have forgotten about the game - the game would be old and new games would be coming out. Sleeper sales don't count because they can't be counted on - sales predictions are based on and about release with the assumption that there will be some small number of late adopters.
