DiemetriX Posted July 26, 2012 Posted July 26, 2012 (edited) How much of your R&D budget has been allocated to WiiU? and then secondly can you comment, in general, on cost of creating games for the WiiU and how that compares to the cost for a PS3, 360 game or a Wii game? "out of 7 games we are planning to launch, 5 games are ports, so those are games for which there is a quite small reinvestment to do. The two games that are original, are ZombiU of course and Rayman, so those ones of course are more expensive but we are not talking about games today, like we were spending on Ghost Recon or Assassin's Creed. so they are much smaller of cost. because as we've always said when there is such an innovation the need is not to have big production value but to concentrate on the innovation, this is what we are trying on Rayman and ZombieU. for the other five games, you are talking about small budget, I'd say of less than a million euro to make some of the ports Source: http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/en-US/investor_center/earnings_sales.aspx According to this article A game costing 15million to make needs to sell 500000 to break even. This the same number I have calculated when comparing what the developers and publishers get from a full priced retail game [$30/24£]. 1million Euro is about 1228652 dollars which again means they have to sell 40955 copies to break even. This is without the cost of marketing Nintendo expects to sell 8 million Wii U consoles by March 2013. And I'm 100% certain most Wii U ports will sell at least 100k-500k copies. This again means that porting games to Wii U is very low risk and will be very profitable. I'm sure we will get a lot of new Wii U port announcements soon. Crysis 3 is probably one of the first to be announced. Any thoughts? And what ports do you want to see? Edited July 26, 2012 by DiemetriX
Serebii Posted July 26, 2012 Posted July 26, 2012 Halo 4! :p Seriously though, while ports would be nice, I'd much rather they worked on new software
DiemetriX Posted July 26, 2012 Author Posted July 26, 2012 I'll agree I'd rather see new games. But that is a way bigger risk on a new console.
madeinbeats Posted July 26, 2012 Posted July 26, 2012 What I want to know is if the 360 is generally the lead development platform, how much in development does it cost to port/co-develop the PS3 version? More than a mill?
Retro_Link Posted July 26, 2012 Posted July 26, 2012 Isn't Rabbids Land exclusive? How can that be done on other consoles?
daftada Posted July 26, 2012 Posted July 26, 2012 I thought £24 was the average trade price for retailers? After production and distribution fees are taken out they'd be left with a little under £20. But yeah, they wouldn't need to sell many copies to make a straight port worthwhile. Adding Wii U specific content would add maybe £100k on top? So still not a huge risk. It all depends on how many gamers make the Wii U their no.1 core gaming machine. Assassins Creed 3 and Colonial Marines are going to bevwatched closely by publishers I'm sure. (so get you preorders in NOW! )
DiemetriX Posted July 26, 2012 Author Posted July 26, 2012 I thought £24 was the average trade price for retailers? After production and distribution fees are taken out they'd be left with a little under £20. You might be right. I just looked at the dollar modell of game sales where about 60% goes to the developer/publisher/marketing. But the split is probably different in different countries. I'll be getting both Aliens and AC3 on Wii U
Dcubed Posted July 27, 2012 Posted July 27, 2012 Porting to Wii U from PS360 is cheap enough because it's piss easy. Porting from PS4/720 however will be harder and probably more costly. Either way, I'm sure devs/publishers will continue to make excuses not to support Wii U. Hell I bet that they'd complain even if Nintendo themselves ported the game for them!
Jamba Posted July 27, 2012 Posted July 27, 2012 Porting to Wii U from PS360 is cheap enough because it's piss easy. Porting from PS4/720 however will be harder and probably more costly. Either way, I'm sure devs/publishers will continue to make excuses not to support Wii U. Hell I bet that they'd complain even if Nintendo themselves ported the game for them! Couldn't agree more. I don't mind when devs make practical business decisions about what platforms to work on but the more and more barriers to entry that Nintendo remove, the more it seems that many of them have a double standard. Practical for everyone else apart from Nintendo, where it's either personal or just a guy feeling bullshitty excuse.
daftada Posted August 4, 2012 Posted August 4, 2012 Just realised I didn't factor in licensing fees into my estimates which are £5-8 per unit. The £11-15 a publisher makes might also need to be split with the developer (depending on their contract) so a Publisher may only end up with a fiver from a £50 game. So they'd to sell at least 200k units to break even on a port, and a hell of a lot more on a Wii U exclusive.
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