April 1st, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »
The mobile games industry seems to be far better off then that of the consoles when we look at an interview with Nintendo of America’s head of marketing Reggie Fils-Aime.
In the interview, Reggie explains that from the 486 games on his market, only 16 are profitable. 9 of those are Nintendo’s own titles. He explains that an average game will sell 150K units, while 1 million units are needed to become profitable. So that is roughly 1 out of every 30 games!?
My guess is that when you look at small and mid-sized publishers, the mobile games industry is probably doing much better at the moment.
In Nintendo’s case, Reggie even goes on to bash the other console platforms. Het explains that Nintendo has chosen not to compete on a graphical level. As so, their games are cheap to develop in comparison to for example the PS3 and Xbox 360. Also, as the Wii itself is also cheap, its market is nearly twice the size. In other words, developers for the PS3 and Xbox 360 hardly have any chance at gaining profitability.
Sadly enough, there was no information on the profitability of the WiiWare platform, but as those games are smaller and cheaper, they might by much more attractive to consumers.
