[Industry Thread] I shall call him...Mini Wii.
cloudeagle
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi and welcome to the Video Game Industry Thread, a place for discussing the business side of the games market. This includes sales figures, changes in publishers/developers, goings-on with important people in the business, interesting development trends and similar things.
Things have calmed down, but for chrissake don't do any of the following:
And now, October's sales figures.
Things have calmed down, but for chrissake don't do any of the following:
-Content-less posts: posts that are just a stupid image macro, YouTube clip, or other irrelevant meme will be treated in hostile manner. This stuff tends to get the thread derailed a bit and it isn't funny to begin with. Playful banter is fine, but here's a concept: joke around using the power of your own wit.
-Chatty Posts: Posts that are basically the digital equivalent of shooting the breeze. Telling people about your personal life, gossiping, and other shit that isn't even remotely on-topic. Even tangentially on-topic things like "Oh, I bought game X from this company we're discussing, and it is so cool!" is still a chat post. Do not reply to chat posts. Report it, and move on.
-Posting VGChartz: it's an unreliable source of data, and we don't need discussion based on bullshit figures. Read more here.
-Posting Lists: Holy crackers, IGN is doing their Top 15 games featuring Charles Barkley! Nobody fucking cares. This is brutally off-topic, a catalyst for shitty behavior, and breathtakingly irrelevant. Just to be absolutely clear: sales figures are not lists.
-Fluff articles from other sites: Yes, sometimes Kotaku or Destructoid will do a painfully stupid article about gaming snacks or something. This isn't really a thread for commenting on games journalism. If Kotaku went out of business or was caught selling reviews to publishers, then yeah it's a fair topic. Whining about how an inane article Kotaku pushed out, however, doesn't really add much to the thread.
-Backseat modding: Dictating what should and shouldn't be discussed based on your personal preferences. If someone is veering off-topic, then it's fine to give them a nudge so long as you're not a dick about it. If someone is blatantly breaking a rule, then report it. Yelling at them will just cause a fight which further derails the thread. It's an action wholly counterproductive to your aims. Don't do it.
-Console war crap: being a cheerleader for a company, piece of hardware, or whatever is a no-go. Shit like "lol sony" is an example of this.
Having said all that: do enjoy the thread. That is, ultimately, the goal of all this.
And now, October's sales figures.
The NPD Group has issued its October retail sales report, revealing a 25 percent drop in total industry sales to $755.55 million, as software sank 25 percent to $451.8 million, while hardware plummeted 37 percent to $187.3 million. The only category to see a slight increase was accessories, which rose five percent to $135.6 million thanks mostly to Skylanders-related items.
· Xbox 360 sold 270,000 units in October, more units than any other console, and held 56 percent share of current-generation console sales in the U.S. This marks the 20th consecutive month that Xbox 360 has held more than a 40 percent share of current-generation console sales in the U.S. (Source: NPD Group, October 2012)
Bethesda's new title Dishonored sold 460,200 units while 2K's XCOM: Enemy Unknown sold 114,000 units. "Due to the launch of Pokemon Black 2 and Pokemon While 2, portable software sales increased by 37% from last October," Callahan added. "However, this growth was not enough to offset declines in console software.”
Medal of Honor Warfighter 300,000
Pokemon 867,000
Resident Evil 6 806,000
Skylanders 269,000
NBA 2k13 1.27m
Vita ~ 35k, better than Aug.
CoP < 20k
Layton < 1k
SF X TK (PSV) ~ 5k
PSP < 10k < PSV < Wii < 50K < 100k < DS < 150k < PS3 < 200K < 3DS < 250K < 360
Switch: 3947-4890-9293
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But seriously, and I asked this in the last thread, does anyone have any official announcements or statements from Zynga over the layoffs yesterday?
I've tried looking, but I can't find any; and you people seem to be better at finding the information than I am.
There was a letter. Bottom of the article.
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/180005/Layoffs_and_closures_at_Zynga_as_company_struggles_to_save_money.php
So anyway... Sony says that the Vita is finally going to catch on this holiday season eh? Wasn't it supposed to catch on like three other times this year?
Thank you! I didn't even think to check Gamasutra, and had only seen articles that speculate a bunch.
Switch (JeffConser): SW-3353-5433-5137 Wii U: Skeldare - 3DS: 1848-1663-9345
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It's the newest bubble. Mobile gaming came up after Facebook games. It'll sink down too. I doubt they'll each fade out completely, and they shouldn't. There's legit products to be made on either platform, the problem is the stigma associated with it all.
Also, aren't Facebook apps based on making many micro-purchases, rather than one-time "buy the game" structures?
They are!
...unfortunately it's probably not coming until much later in 2013 (to judge by its absence from the announced Vita line-up at NYComicCon) and it's probably not something that would appeal to a lot of Vita owners.
Facebook takes a big chunk of the profits? Ease of use maybe?
I mean, i know you can log into facebook from your phone, but maybe that very minor one less step adds up in the long run? I don't know, that's a good question...
Apple takes about 30 percent of the money, doesn't it? I always forget the exact number.
It's not even mobile social gaming that's in decline, it's really just Zynga. And I think people just got really tired of playing the exact same games with slight visual changes, whatever ville just won't hold peoples attention forever. Or they don't want to play some knock-off of another game that adds micro-payment bullshit all over as the only change.
Exactly. The company was utterly, utterly obsessed with metrics above all else, such as little piddly things like "originality" and "fun." Meanwhile EA's taking chances with new types of social games and less punishing microtransactions, and as a result they're making bank. (As I understand it they'd probably still be churning quarterly losses if it weren't for their social/mobile division.)
Revenues on Facebook are up. Zynga is down.
Obviously Zynga led the charge on widespread facebook gaming, but there's real competition now. And maybe Zynga can't rely on the "Ville" brand for eternity.
But at the same time, I figure the market is getting a tad flooded now. More and more and more Facebook apps might mean more revenue generated for Facebook overall, but each individual facebook app or company might not be making the megabucks.
It's plausible at least.
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My understanding of Zynga's problem was always that they bought all these studios, and made tons and tons of games, but basically all they were doing was splitting the same market share into smaller and more numerous buckets with each new game. Which isn't really a strategy for success is it?
I dunno, the way TOR's freemium system looks, I think EA isn't turned off from the idea of ripping customers off.
Yeah, they built their company under the understanding that they'd try to gather up a really strong network effect, so that everyone is playing a Zynga product. But they don't seem to have accounted for the possibility that they'd just end up maintaining dozens of games that equally compete for the exact same users, instead of an ever expanding userbase.
1. * ville games, there's 14 or 15 of these, just reskins of the original
2. * wars, again just rekins of one game
3. Board or casino games
4. copies of old arcade games with a new skin
5. Dream * games
6. a few original ideas, but it doesn't look like more than about 3 of these.
so from what I think, they have just spent too much time taking successful games and re skinning it over and over again. Once the users got bored with the base idea a new look wasn't enough to keep them around and spending.
Without new original games, it was just a matter of time until revenue crashed.
and while they spent all that effort in remaking the same few games 20 times, other companies saw how profitable the social gaming landscape was and moved in.
"Vampire" games?
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
It's why I'm pretty sure that Zynga was formed by people who have never looked at video games before. It's kind of like the dismissive attitude regarding Madden games, only applied for real. Myself and others say that Madden is the "same game" year to year, but even I will stop to point out genuine differences and recognize them and I know it's legit. But for the Zynga folks, it's like they see one game and think all games are like that, just a different presentation layer, and boom go and sell it. But people aren't dumb, they know the difference and similarities between games, and Zynga simply got caught and is paying the price. Or rather, the employees are paying the price.
Cult games.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that Zynga cutting developers is not part of their business plan.
To me, from a pure investment standpoint, the following plan makes alot of sense:
1. Find a studio that is making a game that is generating lots of revenue
2. Purchase that studio and thus gain the intellectual rights to that game
3. Cut ongoing costs for that studio (including cutting staff)
4. Collect revenue for that game over time, recouping and eventually overtaking costs from point 2.
All you need to do is continually repeat this plan over and over again on different companies, and you'll find yourself sitting on a ton of IP that's continually generating revenue.
The only problem with this strategy is point 3 will make it more difficult to accomplish point 1 -- that is, if studios realize that all Zynga does is harvest other studios for profit, they won't be willing to sell to Zynga. Zynga should do whatever they can to minimize the press releases related to point 3.
Don't forget that one of their last big purchases, they bought the developer when it was at its peak performance, and the next day it was just trailing income.
Yeah, the trick with point 1 is you need to find not just a studio with a game that's making money right now. Indeed, this plan wouldn't work with most games, as most games make a ton of money right when they release and then lower amounts after that. The one gaming medium that's the exception to that rule seems to be mobile gaming. And that's where Zynga's been placing their purchases.
Wouldn't really call it 'ripping cutomers off', since that implies deception. The few things they put up with a RNG chance (gimmie bags) seem to have a pretty good droprate of neat stuff. People testing them opened three and got two of the special items and an assload of the decent stuff. Compare that to champions online (owned by perfect world now, which has turned it into a grindfest since they took it over) where someone exploited the character copy system for the test server to get metrics on the grab bags. The average amount to spend to get an actual item (as opposed to the random consumables that are in every bag, and are worthless)? Sixty dollars. Six Zero. THAT is ripping customers off.
Now, the rest of the stuff has stupid high prices for everything and the kitchen sink. It's not ripping people off though, since you know exactly what you are getting.
Now, after all that quibbling over your wording there, yeah the prices for unlocking any subscriber feature are absolutely insane and somebody needs to smack them upside the head before they go live with half that crap.
At the least it's given us some good articles from John Walker and Robert Florence.
http://botherer.org/2012/10/24/games-journalists-and-the-perception-of-corruption/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-24-lost-humanity-18-a-table-of-doritos
Two things. 1) Damn it, it's not a new model of the Wii, it's a whole new console, stop wording things stupidly, press!
2) Ouch. I wonder how steep the loss is.
I think it has to do with the platform of choice for access of Facebook shifting. More people are accessing Facebook through their smartphones or tablets these days than desktops.
While I'm not certain about Android, you definitely can't play Facebook games on iOS. I'd play the crap out of Outernauts if I could access it from my iPhone... but since I can't, I long stopped playing it.
Yeah, while the idea is to make money through the sale of games that can't be helpful when the losses continue to linger.
Well the thing is, Nintendo's first party lineup of games is pretty much a given success, so they'll recoup the losses in that manner. It's a more calculated plan of success than Sony tried. We've seen this before regarding Nintendo; one specific branch of the tree is in the red, and people say, "DOOM!" but the tree as a whole is doing fine.
And the last one is almost entirely because Zynga bought the company that did those ideas, like that * something stuff
The worrying thing is that the 3DS has plenty of successful first-party games and they're still losing money. It's not doom, but their days of monster profits may be over.