News: Fils-Aime: Over 1 Million Copies of a Wii Game = Profit Page 1

Fils-Aime: Over 1 Million Copies of a Wii Game = Profit

31.03.2009

Fils-Aime: Over 1 Million Copies of a Wii Game = Profit on Nintendo gaming news, videos and discussion

Reggie Fils-Aime has revealed that publishers need to sell at least one million units of a game to make a profit.

The New York Times reports that although the Wii has a lower threshold than other home consoles, there's still a need to sell a million copies of a game to turn a significant profit. Fils-Aime also noted that Nintendo's reasoning behind the lack of HD capability was so that games for Wii would be cheaper to make.

16 out of 486 Wii titles have sold over one million units (as of March 1st 2009).

9 of the 16 million sellers are published by Nintendo.

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Sonic_13 31.03.2009#1

Hmmm...only 16?

At Wikipedia we have 33 games cited as selling one million units.
16 from Nintendo, 17 from third parties.

Wii Sports (40.5 million)
Wii Play (20.91 million)
Wii Fit (14.01 million)
Mario Kart Wii (13.67 million)
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (8.1 million)
Super Mario Galaxy (7.66 million)
Mario Party 8 (6.28 million)
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (4.52 million)
Link\'s Crossbow Training (3.44 million)
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (3.4 million)
Animal Crossing: City Folk (3.22 million)
Wii Music (2.5 million)
Super Paper Mario (2.28 million)
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (2.26 million)
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2 million)
Game Party (2 million shipped)
WarioWare: Smooth Moves (1.82 million)
Mario Strikers Charged (1.77 million)
Carnival Games (1.5 million)
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (1.5 million)
Guitar Hero World Tour (1.334 million)
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (1.31 million)
Mario Super Sluggers (1.21 million)
Rayman Raving Rabbids (1.2 million)
Sonic and the Secret Rings (1.2 million)
We Ski (1.2 million)
Big Beach Sports (1.2 million shipped)
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (1.15 million)
Active Life: Outdoor Challenge (1 million)
Red Steel (1 million)
Rock Band (1 million)
Deca Sports (1 million shipped)
Game Party 2 (1 million shipped)

( Edited 31.03.2009 20:58 by Sonic_13 )

Robertd1138 31.03.2009#2

I seem to remember a quote from someone saying that they only had to sell 400K of a game on the Wii to turn a profit.

crackedthesky 31.03.2009#3

I find this hard to believe. If this was the case, why do publishers keep putting out crap games? I can think of about a billion crap titles that I can guarantee didn't sell a million, so you'd think that would stop happening if it caused a deficit for the developer. And yet, we still get tons of crap games...

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BarryH 31.03.2009#4

"Finally, one clarification on the story we did Monday on this subject. For the story, Nintendo had told me that publishers of Wii games need to sell only one million games to turn a profit. The company wrote me to say that it meant that publishers can make a profit selling fewer than one million copies of a particular game. Nintendo declined to be any more specific about a number."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/video-game-makers-seeing-red/?pagemode=print

JoshSL 31.03.2009#5

I read the whole NeoGAF thread this news was also sourced from, and it definitely sounds like the article had a good few errors in it. First of all, Reggie would never advertise the Wii with such a shocking figure, second of all, the NY Times wrote he was the head of marketing at Nintendo, which he hasn't been for a good few years now...

Not just that, but MGS4 needed to sell about 1mil to break even, and saying Wii games cost the same to make as a game like MGS4 is just ridiculous.

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snowdog 01.04.2009#6

For starters the 16 out of 486 titles are as far as I know derived from NPD sources so don't take into account sales in Europe, Australasia or Japan. There must be well over 50 titles that've sold over a million worldwide but it's difficult to tell thanks to Europe not having an NPD equivalent.

Secondly an executive from EA a while back stated that a PS3 title needs to sell over 500,000 to make a profit. Developing and publishing for the PS3 is much more expensive than developing and publishing for the Wii. Even if you ignore the media used dev kits for the PS3 will cost publishers and developers £18,000 each as opposed to dev kits for the Wii which will set back a publisher or developer £2000.

And I'm not too sure about the ownership of the Wii dev kits, but for any Sony dev kits once you've forked out your £18,000 you don't even own the bloody things - they're just leased! Smilie

Development for the Wii is around 3-4 times cheaper than the other two current gen consoles...so I'd guesstimate that you'll only have to sell around 300,000 to make money on a game. And that's worldwide. Smilie

And just in case you were wondering where I got the cost of dev kits from I was working in the industry for a few years. Smilie

Sonic_13 01.04.2009#7

I remembered hearing some figures about million sellers in Iwata's GDC '09 Keynote, so I checked.

During the keynote it was stated:
"So far in the U.S., 75 third-party games for Wii have sold through one million units."

http://wii.ign.com/articles/965/965783p1.html

Canyarion 01.04.2009#8

I won't buy it.

Darkflame 01.04.2009#9

Thats just daft quote, it depends how much you spend on a game, obviously.
Theres going to be a mimimum threshold due to ratail and distribution, but it wont be 1million.

Also, HD has very little to do with costs, I hate the way thats bounded about.
Rendering resolution is mostly to do with polygon count and texture size\'s....thats more GPU power and Ram limitations.
(We arnt at a stage where SD quality in terms of textures is maxed-out. The majority of the pixals on the screen in ps3/360 games are still bigger on the screen then in the texture resolution. This probably wont change untill we switch to procedral textures, or game budgets double.)

( Edited 01.04.2009 10:33 by Darkflame )

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Flynnie 02.04.2009#10

snowdog said:
For starters the 16 out of 486 titles are as far as I know derived from NPD sources so don't take into account sales in Europe, Australasia or Japan. There must be well over 50 titles that've sold over a million worldwide but it's difficult to tell thanks to Europe not having an NPD equivalent.
Secondly an executive from EA a while back stated that a PS3 title needs to sell over 500,000 to make a profit. Developing and publishing for the PS3 is much more expensive than developing and publishing for the Wii. Even if you ignore the media used dev kits for the PS3 will cost publishers and developers £18,000 each as opposed to dev kits for the Wii which will set back a publisher or developer £2000.
And I'm not too sure about the ownership of the Wii dev kits, but for any Sony dev kits once you've forked out your £18,000 you don't even own the bloody things - they're just leased!
Development for the Wii is around 3-4 times cheaper than the other two current gen consoles...so I'd guesstimate that you'll only have to sell around 300,000 to make money on a game. And that's worldwide.
And just in case you were wondering where I got the cost of dev kits from I was working in the industry for a few years.

Well GFK Charttrack and ELSPA do track some figures, not as throughly as the NPD though