By narutomaki on Sep 6, 2010

pretty even;y split for Sony and Nintendo

By Ponkotsu on Sep 6, 2010

Latter’s making more money than the former, though. PS3 games don’t sell well enough in Japan to make money, and they drop off the charts quickly. Wii and DS games make more money much more consistently. There’s very few PS3 games on this list, and most of them aren’t selling well – enough to chart, but by what PS3 budgets require for profit, very poorly. And of course, some of these, like Kane & Lynch and Assassin’s Creed, are franchises that don’t sell well at all in Japan, while ModNation Racers has actually bombed in all regions after the big marketing campaign Sony did for the game.

PSP games don’t make as much as DS games on average, but most if not all of these have at least broken even, if not at least made some money. People don’t seem to pirate on the PSP in Japan quite as much as they do in the west, though Monster Hunter’s the one franchise that consistently does really well and has served as pretty much the hit series for the portable. Once Capcom puts out a 3DS Monster Hunter though, the PSP’ll pretty much be obsolete. Nintendo looks to be pretty set to snap up that whole market while continuing the usual DS crowd from before with the 3DS.

It’ll be interesting to see how the trends shift again after the 3DS launch, considering that console gaming has decreased dramatically in Japan this past generation, while portable gaming has become the primary market there.

By WazWii on Sep 6, 2010

I am curious as to how you can determine what games make money without internal data. Maybe you have this.

You cannot really compare Wii/DS games to PS3 games either. The whole cycle generation is different. Personally if I was Nintendo I would be thinking of those Wii sales right now which are deteriorating rapidly.

In terms of the PSP – obsolete? The PSP survived the Brain Training Age of the DS Lite and has come back strong. With Monster Hunter 3 coming this Winter as well as Parasite Eve and then in the future Agito I think you will find it will stick around for a few years yet.

By Ponkotsu on Sep 6, 2010

Actually, determining which games have made money on the HD consoles isn’t difficult at all. Those platforms are known for requiring multimillion dollar budgets and huge teams for development – this has been common knowledge and something Sony and Microsoft pretty much boasted about going into this generation. That basically EVERYTHING had to be treated like a blockbuster, but the fact remains that most games aren’t, can’t be, and will never sell that well. Sales tracking sites like VGChartz keep long term tabs on game sales, HD game sales included, and while it’s not uncommon to see PS3 games make it into the charts in Japan, they all drop very quickly and Japanese PS3 games sell very poorly in the west – as do most games on the platform in general.

The average HD game needs to sell well over a million copies – even Crackdown only barely broke even at 1.5 million sold, as Microsoft employees have admitted, and didn’t turn a profit despite what a hugely hyped title it was – to make money. Most video games don’t come close to that, and most HD games don’t make it anywhere near that. The goalpost to achieve profitability on those consoles is astronomically beyond what it has ever been in gaming before, and as a result, most companies supporting the HD consoles actively are openly bleeding to death on them, since the so-called “hardcore” HD audience isn’t large enough and doesn’t buy enough games to support most titles.

It’s not so different at all – it’s a matter of development costs versus sales versus where the market is. The HD consoles have divided a particular segment of the market against itself and created a deeply dangerous, toxic environment for the publishers and developers supporting them. Both consoles pigeonholed themselves and their markets right out the door by focusing on pushing the overpriced “luxury”/”superior” “hardcore” gaming image right out the door, which is centered around retaining last generation controls and making online-centric extremely high budget FPSes the standard. Both Sony and Microsoft actively pushed the mass market away right out the door this generation, where Nintendo welcomed them. And now the industry is desperate to pigeonhole the Wii market as being nothing but children and the elderly, when the Wii has drawn the same vital mass market to it that the market leaders in previous generations relied on. Core games sell on the Wii. Niche games make money. And there’s an audience ravenous for more serious attention that it’s not getting. Third party Wii sales have suffered as of late as a result of serious efforts on the system and their continued refusal to market games on the platform at all. But Wii game sales in general? They’re by no means deteriorating, let alone rapidly. Sales on both HD consoles are stagnant and unprofitable as ever despite the media still trying to push the narrative that they’re making comebacks against Nintendo that they aren’t. Wii games still sell better than HD titles on average, and the Wii attach rate is the highest the industry has ever seen in a market leader. Even Reggie pointed this out at Nintendo’s press conference at E3: Despite the narrative and constant attempts to paint the image otherwise online, Wii owners buy more games and spend more time gaming than the opposition. A serious lack of third party effort and marketing is the biggest problem third parties face in their Wii efforts this generation because they’re pouring all their financial resources into repeated multimillion dollar flops on the other consoles. (Again, see Capcom this year: ALL their HD games this year bombed spectacularly and their recent financial report had them losing a ton of money this year. Monster Hunter 3, a niche, ultra “hardcore” Wii title in a series that has never sold well in the west, was directly marketed by Nintendo, and it’s now the best selling console release the series has ever seen, as well as the best selling game in the series in the west. Dragon Quest IX has received similar treatment on the DS and it’s getting sales Square never got out of the series in their half-assed efforts to market it at best here as well.) To claim that Wii sales are deteriorating, let alone compared to the HD consoles now, is to admit that you haven’t paid attention to the sales trends at all. Wii games rarely get marketed, let alone enough to get a frontloaded launch like HD games typically do – seeing big numbers at first, then quickly dropping off and falling out of the charts entirely – but Wii games sell slowly and steadily over a far longer duration, making an actual reliable profit when a game is actually good. This has been the visible trend for years: Extremely front-loaded HD sales with a rapid dropoff and failure to profit. Slow and steady Wii sales over a far longer time, and sustainable profits.

The PSP’s software sales have always been unspectacular: its main selling point has been its console style portable experience, but most games on the system have never seen particularly great sales. Once Monster Hunter inevitably comes to the 3DS, as the series director has wanted to bring it to Nintendo’s portables and now with the 3DS, he has the hardware power to outdo the PSP installments, the PSP crowd will inevitably move on to the 3DS. As for a comeback? PSP sales have been in an ongoing decline for a long time now. What sales numbers have you been looking at? The system’s numbers jump for a little while every time a new Monster Hunter drops, but they aren’t remotely consistent anymore and haven’t been strong for a long time. Parasite Eve isn’t a huge franchise and won’t likely drive hardware sales at all, and Crisis Core wasn’t a huge hardware mover either – Agito likely won’t do much for it either. Monster Hunter has been the one certifiably hit series for the PSP, but at this point, in terms of software consistency and competitiveness, it’s barely hanging on by a thread, and once the 3DS hits, its last point of relevance in its hardware gap from the DS is gone. Sony’s in no position financially to release a successor at this point, either, given the dire financial straits the company is increasingly in these days, in part due to the massive failure and losses the PS3 in particular has incurred for the company as a whole, completely destabilizing it, and like Kinect for Microsoft, Move will be another multimillion dollar loss product line, with the userbase hostile to it after years of deriding the Wii and motion controls, and the media similarly disinterested.

By WazWii on Sep 18, 2010

I actually agree with you on these points regarding large AAA development costs and profitability. However there is another point – eventually these will be mitigated over the years as development costs come down and install bases grow. There is a reason why this generation will last longer than the last. I am unsure where the Wii fits into this.

In terms of the Wii – I meant hardware not software sales. Hardware sales are rapidly going down and Nintendo has to respond.

I disagree with your PSP analysis. Japan sales are good – nearly up there with the DS line of series (combined for this year). On an individual basis it manages to outsell them – Monster Hunter 3 will be massive. Crisis Core did strong software numbers back in the day and I have no doubt other great core games such as The 3rd Birthday, Agito etc will pull in strong numbers just like Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Just because they do not achieve DS like success does not mean they have not sold well and contributed to PSP hardware sales.

By WazWii on Sep 18, 2010

Hello there;

Hope you get this message. I responded to your comments. Hope you can respond back! I know it is late but I had the link buried in my favorites and forgot about it!

Thank You.

By Ponkotsu on Oct 1, 2010

The problem is, we’re not seeing meaningful growth for either of these bases – we see the sales numbers grow on the HD consoles, but the software numbers aren’t growing to match them, and there’s no notable drop in development costs visible at all. In fact, we’ve been seeing fairly consistently massive costs on these platforms – as costs for some elements drop, companies keep investing even more money in trying to push the graphics as far as they can, which just ends up costing even more in the long run. There’s not going to be a day on the PS3 or 360 when either becomes massively profitable regardless of how long this generation runs, and neither is suddenly going to see a day when games are regularly making money on a quarter of a million sales or less, when most Japanese games on the HD consoles see absolutely dire numbers to begin with. The less the third parties focus on the Wii and the more they focus on the HD consoles, the less they’re going to be able to continue to stomach HD development costs. Nippon Ichi has announced that they’re basically falling into financial ruin over their focus on the PS3 and PSP. How have they responded? By announcing even more PS3 support when they’re already not making money on it. The Wii is pretty much the third parties’ only real hope for sustainability on consoles this gen, and unless third parties wake up to this – and Nintendo needs to do their part to wake them up to this – we’re going to see some more companies fail this generation.

Yeah, Nintendo needs to work on courting more major third party support and figure out what they can put out in Japan to make Wii sales explode again (As New Super Mario Bros. Wii caused) in order to get hardware sales back up again. Their sales are currently steady and the competition isn’t going to catch up to them in Japan, but their sales can be much better than they are, and this is definitely all about courting more major third party support (Dragon Quest X will be massive, as Monster Hunter 3 was) and figuring out what they can do with first party properties to get sales up again. Metroid: Other M backfired since Japan didn’t exactly want an awkward HD-style movie game like Sakamoto thought, unshockingly.

Hardware sales for the PSP are good, yes, but a lot of these numbers come from its additional features – music especially – and software sales have mostly failed to match the DS’s. At this point, the DS is mostly over the hill and oversaturated, which accounts for what the PSP’s doing now in software sales, but Monster Hunter is one of the only consistently strong properties on the PSP. It’s easy to cherrypick a few strong selling titles on the platform, but it’s still fraught with ports and most PSP games haven’t seen particularly great sales. Crisis Core sold well on the FFVII name, though that’s begun to lose its power of old, and Birth by Sleep was an unshocking hit, but Peace Walker, while successful, hasn’t largely been considered anywhere near the hit it was expected to be. It’s hard to predict how Agito will do after the massive backlash FFXIII received, seeing the worst mainline FF console release sales yet after Square tried to plan for it to outdo FFVII and their hubris came back to bite them hard. Parasite Eve hasn’t seen a new game in about a decade, though, and it never had FF-level market power. I wouldn’t put too much faith in The 3rd Birthday. Even player impressions so far from TGS have been that it’s an unspectacular shooter and nothing more. I won’t say that these games didn’t contribute to PSP hardware sales – Crisis Core and Monster Hunter absolutely have – but it doesn’t diminish the fact that the PSP still is no DS in terms of success and profitability, and that most PSP games don’t sell all that well when even their biggest hits can’t touch a significant part of the DS’s library in sales numbers or profitability. I certainly wouldn’t try to take the PSP’s successes away from it, but I wouldn’t exaggerate these successes and their impact on the market, either. Misreading the market – pretty much always in the vein of “Nintendo’s in trouble and bad for everybody! Sony’s the real winner!” – is a serious problem for hte industry these days that’s caused a tremendous amount of profit loss this gen. It’s time for the industry to get over its irrational anti-Nintendo slant before greater collapse happens. Sony’s platforms aren’t market leaders by any measure of the imagination or profitability, and they shouldn’t be treated as such. The PS3 is an unmitigated disaster, and the PSP’s largely been a mixed bag, though it’s certainly done better than any previous portable rival. With the likes of the PSPGo, though, Sony’s shown they have no idea how to move forward in the industry and where or what their market is or what it wants – the 3DS is in a very good position to disrupt any “PSP2″ than the DS did in crushing the original PSP, given that the big graphical advantage that defined the PSP’s one real advantage over the DS has been completely removed now.

By WazWii on Oct 1, 2010

Very good points indeed.

Most interesting was the industry anti-slant attitude. I agree. I cannot really explain why this is. Is Nintendo not doing enough? Iwata talked about this recently – he actually said Nintendo made the 3DS more powerful in order for developers to say we can now make games for the 3DS as it is powerful enough. Maybe then that is the answer – developers want to maximize power and graphics – I cannot help but think this attitude is problematic.

Is it just Western developers siding with Western companies? (I guess Sony is slightly more Western than Nintendo in the HQ manner). I mean combined 360 and PS3 offer a large install base. Perhaps the bigger issue here is that the developers kind of missed the trick this generation – they completely did not anticipate the Wii – and were just pretty much looking at the PS3 and 360. However at least now look – they are supporting the 3DS strongly so let us hope things have changed. Iwata for sure wants to go after the third-parties this time.

I agree Sony are lost. It is a shame. They brought a massive amount to this industry – second only to Nintendo. But the people in charge of the unit have no clue what is going on around them. Too bad.

I think the PSP has been a mixed success true. It has got some great games and a few more coming but in Western markets its multi-media features fall short and it cannot match the depth and breadth of the DS’s software. I do not believe anymore that PSP2 is the biggest threat to 3DS – I believe iTouch and Apple is.

As for the Wii I think it will have two more years on the market before we see its successor. There are some titles coming out for the system soon over the next year so hopefully it can maintain its sales. I highly anticipate Nintendo next-generation system though.

I agree with the whole development cost issue. If you look at the profits of big gaming companies they are not fantastic – I always feel the video-game business model needs to develop into one that is far more sustainable. Nintendo did exceptionally well this generation – completely different strategy. I hope others learn from this.