159 réponses à ce sujet

[GreyLycanTrope]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

David7204 wrote...

I don't think examples are going to convince me.

Why did you ask for some then?

He doesn't have time for reason, he's a man on the edge!

[Star fury]

How about DAI would be a good game even if it doesn't sell well? Bioware care a lot about "artistic integrity", so it's better to judge Inqusition not as a commercial product. Fallout 1 & 2 were commercial failures but become a cult classic.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

David7204 wrote...

I don't think examples are going to convince me.

Of course not, you never change your mind on anything because HEROISM.

I'm just glad that you seem to have finally gotten around to playing DA.

[Conduit0]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

This is arguable. Wii games blew the doors off video game sales for a number of years, despite being of lower graphical quality. The Guitar Hero games always had shoddy graphics, but excelled in the gameplay they were delivering. And games like TWD have recently received great critical and user acclaim while also making a ton of money, but have simple animations and graphics.

Your examples don't really hold up. The Wii did well because it was marketed to nongamers who ate it up like candy, that is of course until they had there fill and now the Wii U is struggling to even remain relevent. Guitar Hero and its ilk was a fad, it did great for a couple years and then died out completely. The Walking Dead's success was more than just the product of being a good game. TWD had a popular comic book and TV series promoting interest in it and it was sold in an episodic format, and as microtransactions have taught us, its far easier to get people to spend money in small increments then one large lump sum.

Fast Jimmy wrote...
I think the much more likely scenario is that games with cutting edge graphics are much easier to market with little to no improved gameplay or sound game design. Basically, it becomes easy to mask the bad games with shiny graphics. So you have a huge budget for graphics, a huge budget for marketing, which means your game has to sell millions upon millions of units in order to break even.

But if you devote your game to a focus on gameplay, story or other unique aspect and forego the super-expensive graphics and the multi-million dollar budgets, you may find that gamers (or, at least, ENOUGH gamers) buy your game to make a good return on the money invested, since you can get away with lower production costs across the board.

Not to be rude, but this just smacks of pure hipster, good graphics have never saved a bad game.

[deuce985]

Nobody can accurately tell you this because none of us know how much budget is behind DAI. I will say it wouldn't surprise me to see DA2 drew more profit % than DAO for EA. DAO was on a what, 5 year dev cycle? DA2 on a little over a year.

Estimated sold:

DAO = 4 million+

DA2 = 2 million+

I'm going to guess DA2 drew more profit for both EA/Bioware because it had a lower budget on a shorter time schedule. A much shorter one at that. DAI is going to need to bring serious numbers in I believe. No way does EA except their numbers to be anything less than 5 million+. Again, it's another DA game on a very long dev cycle of at least 3 years. Time is money and it swells the budget. They're giving Bioware time because they think they can tap the Skyrim market which is probably unrealistic expectation, IMO. Just my observation. Absolutely no way will EA's projections be anything realistic or conservative for their shareholders. This is a company that expects 5 million+ from all their games and expected Dead Space 3 to sell those numbers despite never coming close in the franchise.

Perhaps the biggest factor in the commercial numbers is how many copies are bought at $60. It doesn't matter if a game sells 5 million copies at a very discounted price. Shareholders want that early adoption at $60 like the ME3 numbers were very good. They had almost 1 million in North America on day 1 alone. That would easily please a shareholder. Thus, the negatives of not being a private company. Always have to please the shareholders.

Of course, most of what I said is pure speculation.

Modifié par deuce985, 18 décembre 2013 - 06:33 .

[DRTJR]

I think that DAI will have a little leneancy as to how much it makes because it's job is to keep the fan-base loyal to Bioware, Retool a shooter's engine so that it can make RPGs (which they can sell Frostbite now), and help remove the worst company ever stigma. In short DAI is a good will tour,

Modifié par DRTJR, 18 décembre 2013 - 06:33 .

[Fredward]

How can anyone suggest anything if we don't even know what their budget is? I mean really.

[deuce985]

DRTJR wrote...

I think that DAI will have a little leneancy as to how much it makes because it's job is to keep the fan-base loyal to Bioware, Retool a shooter's engine so that it can make RPGs (which they can sell Frostbite now), and help remove the worst company ever stigma. In short DAI is a good will tour,

I seriously doubt they care about any of that. They were just voted as one of the best corporations to work for. Apparently their employees enjoy working for them. They want money. I highly doubt they care about what a bunch of angry raging internet forums have to say about Bioware/EA. If they could appeal to an entirely new fanbase and sell 10 million+ copies, to hell with the "Bioware fanbase". They're a business. They're out to make money before anything else. Bioware's job is to pitch an idea and sell EA on it. They then please their publisher umbrella by making them a satisfactory project that rakes the money in.

Hopefully along the way they please fans and Bioware has fun making the project.

Modifié par deuce985, 18 décembre 2013 - 06:39 .

[deuce985]

Foopydoopydoo wrote...

How can anyone suggest anything if we don't even know what their budget is? I mean really.

Exactly. I think it's a safe assumption that DAI is not a cheap project to work on though. They're using the biggest teams they've had on any project(aside from SWTOR) and the game has been in development for several years already. I'm pretty sure EA views this project as AAA and so they expect those results commercially.

[DRTJR]

deuce985 wrote...

DRTJR wrote...

I think that DAI will have a little leneancy as to how much it makes because it's job is to keep the fan-base loyal to Bioware, Retool a shooter's engine so that it can make RPGs (which they can sell Frostbite now), and help remove the worst company ever stigma. In short DAI is a good will tour,

I seriously doubt they care about any of that. They were just voted as one of the best corporations to work for. Apparently their employees enjoy working for them. They want money. I highly doubt they care about what a bunch of angry raging internet forums have to say about Bioware/EA. If they could appeal to an entirely new fanbase and sell 10 million+ copies, to hell with the "Bioware fanbase". They're a business. They're out to make money before anything else. Bioware's job is to pitch an idea and sell EA on it. They then please their publisher umbrella by making them a satisfactory project that rakes the money in.

Hopefully along the way they please fans and Bioware has fun making the project.

If Bioware fans count for 35% of the sales (Hypotheticaly) of a game, That is both a garenteed market as well as free publicity since they spread the word far and wide with out EA having to spend a penny, If the hype that the fans provide is another 15% then HALF OF THE SALES are either directly from the fans or indirectly from the fans. The fans of Bioware have had a generaly poor reseption of ME3 and DA2 so they're letting Bioware do their thing. Also fans buy DLC which I guess is profitable considering DA2 got two really kick ass DLCs 

[David7204]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

David7204 wrote...

I don't think examples are going to convince me.

Why did you ask for some then?

I didn't.

[spirosz]

Fast Jimmy wrote...

Humans in general are not very smart, and RPGs (In my presumtious opinion) caters to smarter and wiser people - not the stupid masses. However an epic commercial on TV might drag these stupid masses in.

I'd just like to address this, as it was talked about in another thread the other day.

Question, who the hell said this? 

[Melca36]

Maria Caliban wrote...

EA does not expect DA:I to sell 5 million.

They'd like 1 million the first month and 2-3 million by the time it ends up in their quarterly report.

Mass Effect 3 managed 3.5 million and is, I believe, BioWare's best selling game. If DA:I could reach those numbers, no one would complain, but I don't think anyone is counting on it.

I believe Origins sold more

[The Flying Grey Warden]

Are we talking about the amount of money in millions or the amount of games in millions?

I'd say 2 million copies, at 60 dollars usd a game it comes out to 120,000,000,000 usd, so it should be enough to break even and anything else will be considered a success.

[David7204]

Only a fraction of the sale price goes to BioWare.

[HiroVoid]

It depends on how many of those millions buys the DLC.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

1000000000 $ or if it is less, then it will be failure and this is the reason why RPG genre is dying and the investments on this genre should be transferred to Kinect and Mobile games.

[Fredward]

deuce985 wrote...

Foopydoopydoo wrote...

How can anyone suggest anything if we don't even know what their budget is? I mean really.

Exactly. I think it's a safe assumption that DAI is not a cheap project to work on though. They're using the biggest teams they've had on any project(aside from SWTOR) and the game has been in development for several years already. I'm pretty sure EA views this project as AAA and so they expect those results commercially.

Just out of curiousity what's the average budget for a AAA title?

[The Flying Grey Warden]

David7204 wrote...

Only a fraction of the sale price goes to BioWare.

And a fraction is only able to be taken at all. Most of the sales go to paying off the cost of production, so your take is really only a few million unless you make that grand theft auto money.

[billy the squid]

David7204 wrote...

Fast Jimmy wrote...

In an industry that spends, dollar for dollar, as much on advertising as it does for actual game development...

I doubt that.

Do you know what EA's marketing costs were in 2011? Over $700 million. for the fiscal year. and it recieved 2.4 billion in revenue. Should tell you something about their expenditure when a third of their operating costs are marketing at a time when they were developing TOR which had run into the $200 million mark in dev costs. 

It's in the public company reports and books, if you could ever bother to read a company report.

[David7204]

Funny, and here I thought 29.1% was 29.1%. Not 50.

[billy the squid]

Funny, clearly you don't grasp ratios, nor understand overhead expenditure as separate from R&D costs in addition to marketing.

[David7204]

I'd be delighted to know what magical math you used to turn 29.1% into 50%. Does it involve listing off as many nonsensical terms as you can find off Wikipedia in a clumsy and transparent attempting to feign competency? Or perhaps squealing that any deduction is unfounded because principles only apply in textbooks and not in the real world?

[The Flying Grey Warden]

Where is this 50 percent thing coming from david? You are the one who brought it up, not billy.

And a third of the budget being for nothing but advertisement, when even a 1/3 of that budget could have been divided up and used to give both the old republic and mass effect 3 a much more comfortable budget to work with, is pretty damn bad.

They didn't spend as much on their biggest game to date as they did on just advertising the game, that's just sad. And before you try to play cute and innocent and claim that "Oh so they shouldn't advertise at all huh?" No, that is not what I am saying and you damn well should know that. I am saying that i feel more then confident that EA could still advertise their games at top efficiency while only spending 500 million, and the rest could be used to give more games, such as dragon age inquisition, a bigger operating budget to work with that fiscal year.

[David7204]

Fast Jimmy. Who said the industry spends 'dollar for dollar' as much on advertisement as development.