Wii Games Need to Sell a Million Copies to Make Profit

[TsunamiWombat]

I feel this will somewhat be resolved when consoles cease to exist and merge with PC's to create a "Entertainment unit", which is effectivly a PC but chopped down to only play games. That is the ultimate future of gaming- a bastard child of both which uses a mouse AND a gamepad (which will combine a keyboard with a controller somehow). Also unicorns will fly over the whitehouse.

 

[Erana]

Hilarious. I wonder why Reggie "scoffs" at OnLive... http://www.onlive1.com/showthread.php?t=30

Probably because Nintendo's most profitable games, which they could survive on alone, are their own franchises. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, etc.

I think this highlights a problem on the horizon for console gaming. Namely, that more and more its coming into conflict with the "dying" pc gaming industry, and this is something that will likely grow more and more with distribution systems like Steam. Its getting harder and harder for Microsoft and Sony to turn a profit on their gaming division, mostly because they're spending more on producing the games/consoles and selling them to a comparatively small audience. The end result is they need to sell more and more games to make a profit, with less and less gamers actually buying them. Add in used game sales, piracy, both alleviated by digital distribution, and the lowering costs of high end PC's (or at least the kind of PC you'd need to run newer games) and the PC certainly seems poised to replace consoles entirely. And if it looks like their gaming division won't make them any money, Microsoft and Sony can axe it.

Naturally, of course, this doesn't apply to Nintendo. As already stated, Nintendo can self-sustain on its own franchises marketing to the same audience they have been since the NES era. I'm talking about the kids, of course, since thats the very reason they have those franchises and have Mario for a mascot.

Hey, I'm fine if consoles die- as long as someone makes sure that a controller can handle as well on a PC as they do for the console...

* Imagine: Master Chef (2007) (known as Imagine: Happy Cooking in PAL regions)

I was sooo confused.... I read that as Master Cheif.
Yahzee did it agian.

 

[KDR_11k]

1 million games to make a profit, and 25 million to develop a game....

I don't know when I ever see a game that was 25 dollars which cost 25 million to create, so something about his math sucks (unless I missed something). Technically speaking, games are usually around 60 dollars CDN, which makes 60 million dollars if a million are sold, for a profit of 35 million, so where the hell are these figures coming from??

Actually the Wii games cost only 10 million and need to make the million sales to profit. They're probably calculating that the other expenses will roughly scale with the dev costs.

I would MUCH rather play a fun game that looked like a PS2 title than a short, buggy, or unbalanced game that looks like Crysis. I'm SURE I'm not alone there.

You are not alone. The problem is that Metacritic rules the industry and reviewers don't like next-gen games which don't tick all the boxes.
No voice acting? No high-def explosions? No online multiplayer? Then forget your 80+ average rating and wave goodbye to hundreds of thousands of potential sales. Therefore the most successful games are those which do a lot of things quite well at the expense of doing anything exceptional. Games are getting gradually worse, in other words, because average rating counts for more than it ever has: forget the occasional 10/10; solid 8/10s and 9/10s across the board are what make the money. Which leads me nicely on to what KDR_11k said:

The problem is not with the delivery method, it's with what is being delivered.

Yes, yes, yes. We're constantly being harassed by publishers (yr KILLING the INDUSTRY!) for not buying products straight off the shelves like we used to, but the truth is that it's because the product being offered is typically of a vastly inferior quality compared to ten or even five years ago. I remember making huge wishlists of literally dozens of games that I wanted to play, but now I find myself sitting around for weeks & months at a time waiting for something worthwhile to come along.

If I wanted to stay with the pace in days gone by I had to buy things new or else I'd get left behind and never be able to catch up. Now if I just wait a month the price has usually dropped by 50% because word has got out that the 95.38343% masterpiece from Genius Creator X is actually a buggy unplayable mess beyond the first three hours.

Even as I write this I'm farming eBay for obscure PS2 games because absolutely nothing interests me on the major consoles right now. Clearly not everyone feels quite as strongly as me, but enough people are voting with their wallets to ensure that the "industry" has to take notice sooner or later. Stop shitting all over us and we will support you.

I wasn't talking about declining quality, I don't even think quality is declining. The problem is that the games themselves simply are designed in a way that doesn't appeal to most people, it's not a lack of quality, it's a development of the wrong qualities. The number of gamers is stagnating because the current designs have already reached their largest possible audience and the ones left out won't join gaming without a change in designs (which is what the whole "casual" stuff is about, getting people who were left out by the old designs into gaming by providing them with new designs). The high dev costs are a symptom of overstraining to reach one audience, the increasing graphics are a way of wooing a certain customer pool that is somewhat understood but limited in numbers and these numbers are becoming a problem. The fight for these numbers is so hard that it takes more effort than it pays off. Meanwhile there are many underdeveloped qualities that could be used to increase the numbers greatly while requiring little effort to improve as they are still very barren. A problem for traditional game devs however is that they don't know the qualities that need to be developed. They're core gamers themselves, they know what core gaming wants but they don't know what it's like to not be a part of that, they don't know what the people who are not core gamers want. Hence when they try to make a "casual" game they usually fall flat because they have the wrong understanding of their target audience. They think of a "casual" gamer as a little core gamer, someone who wants all the same things but is just too stupid and untrained to deal with complexity or difficulty. That is WRONG.

Also I recall a study finding that there's no correlation between sales and review scores, means what the games score on Metacritic does not matter in real life. Of course some developers may be thinking that their scores matter but I think one thing that successful "casual" game developers found is that the game reviewers will only measure the traditional qualities of the game which don't matter for the target audience. Doesn't help that many core gamers act like those who like "casual" games are just ignorant of better games when, if you apply the yardsticks the new audience uses, these games are terrible.

 

[painfull2006]

I doubt it very much but i kind of wish they did have to

if there was this sort of pressure on them maybe they would make some GOOD GAMES.

 

[AdmiralWolverineLightningbolt]

ninja bread man and anubis 2 (the SAME game!) disagree