@apujanata, I believe he meant on avg. But I don't even believe on avg that Wii games take 1 million to profit. There are 360 games that have not sold 1 million and are still seen as successful, and get sequels, etc. Those cost a lot more to develop.
@apujanata,I agree that there would be some fluctuation based on development cost...however the more 'basic' Wii games also sell at a lower price point than the other two consoles...thus volume of sales would still be important. Also, do we know the amount of $ that flow back to the developer per game vs X or PS3 games...is it different?
The trouble is averaging his statement out over all titles...I can't imaging there is much more development cost to Gardening Mama once you have Cooking Mama done.
@PhilHarrision, Isn't profitable / Break Even # different for each game, depending on their development (and marketing) cost ? I think New York Times article (the source of joystiq's article) quoted Reggie incorrectly. I have a really hard time believing that Carnival Games need 1 Million sales to be profitable. It would be profitable long before 1 Million (probably 500K or lower is the break event point).
Low-cost games aren't the ones sitting in the Wii rack at your local retailer. Even a Wii game needs to sell at least one million units to be profitable, by Reggie Fils-Aime's estimates. (And Only 16 out of 486 Wii games have crossed that threshold as of March 1, by NPD estimates.)
Marc Franklin, Nintendo’s Director of PR,
“…what you’re seeing is this average business model, the typical business model of, say, the five to six year generation of hardware is just not valid anymore. The Wii is a very approachable, accessible platform that’s going to interest gamers for years to come.”
Are the Wii's hard drive woes finally a thing of the past? No more fridge cleaning, friends. While Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was busy making his GDC keynote address this morning, the Wii itself was receiving its long-awaited storage solution. If you check your console for an available system update now, you'll find it's finally arrived.
Japanese financial news source Nikkei.net predicts that the Nintendo Wii will break 50 million in worldwide sales this month.
This latest milestone means that the Wii will have sold faster than the PS2 did during its first three years when Sony achieved 50 million PlayStation 2 consoles shipped.
RUMOR: According to a rumored customer survey, Netflix is gauging subscriber interest in a streaming movie and television service on another current generation console, this time on the Nintendo Wii.
According to a report on Joystiq, the Netflix streaming subscription service would be comparable to the one implemented via Xbox Live. The proposed service for the Wii would offer a library of "over 12,000 choices"
“We estimate sell-through of 725k Wii, 300k Xbox 360 and 200k PS3 consoles (a 26% year-over-year unit increase in consoles),” said the analysts.“Our console sell-through forecasts reflect our belief that supplies for Wii hardware were up year-over-year. Double-digit hardware unit growth implies solid software sales growth for the succeeding year, giving us confidence in our 12% growth estimate for 2009 U.S. software sales.”
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I believe he meant on avg. But I don't even believe on avg that Wii games take 1 million to profit. There are 360 games that have not sold 1 million and are still seen as successful, and get sequels, etc. Those cost a lot more to develop.