Wii games must sell 1m to make a profit

By Ellie Gibson Published 31 March, 2009

So says Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime.

Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime has said Wii games don't start making money for their publishers until a million copies have been shifted.

That's according to an article in the New York Times, which also reports the average budget for making and marketing a game these days is USD million (GBP 17.5 million / EUR 18.8 million). However, the majority of titles only sell a maximum of 150,000 units.

Fils-Aime "said publishers of games for its Wii console needed to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit", according to the article. That might sound like a lot, but "he said that was a lower threshold than for the other consoles".

It's all thanks to the fact Wii games aren't in high-def, and are therefore cheaper to make - which Reggie reckons Nintendo took into account when developing the console.

NPD figures show that of the 486 games release for Wii, just 16 have sold more than a million copies - and nine of those are Nintendo first-party titles.

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About Ellie Gibson

Since joining Eurogamer in the mid 2000s, Ellie has written about subjects as diverse as the fall of Gizmondo, the rise of Hollyoaks actresses in Red Alert games and the noise a bear makes under NSFW circumstances.

Read more articles from Ellie by visiting the Ellie Gibson archive page.

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Comments (31) Latest comment 3 years ago

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  • DFawkes #1 3 years ago

    I find that hard to believe, though it's hardly the kind of thing you'd lie about.

  • Octoroc #2 3 years ago

    Is this good news or bad news?

    Is it even news?

    I don't know.

  • Goodfella #3 3 years ago

    So, 470 games didn't make ANY profit? Yeah right.

  • coolbritannia #4 3 years ago

    Bullshit.

  • Dizzy #5 3 years ago

    I thought a Wii game only cost about 100 euro to make? ;)

  • Gnort #6 3 years ago

    What I find particularly hard to believe is his inference is that PS3 and Xbox 360 games have to sell significantly more than a million copies before they make money. So every game that has sold under a million is losing its publisher money?

  • Ignatius_Cheese #7 3 years ago

    Considering around 350 of the titles available on the Wii had a budget of nowhere NEAR what Fils-Aime is suggesting, of course those third rate 3rd party developers are making a profit...

  • Evolution #8 3 years ago

    Well it make sense that PS3/360 games cost more to develop with more staff + longer development time, but I don't believe the "one million copies" figure for a moment.

  • Wastelander #9 3 years ago

    Reggie has caught the PR gibberish pox.
    Best just to wheel him out the back door and he can have a nice long rest with Ken Kutaragi.

  • Anthony_UK #10 3 years ago

    Carnival games cost 17.5 million to make?

  • MisterFahrenheit #11 3 years ago

    the average budget for making and marketing a game these days is USD million

    USD how many?

    Also, no way the Wii would be flooded with so much cheap awful tat if it was all haemorrhaging money for the publishers. Maybe he's just saying it to make them think twice about releasing their cheap awful tat.

  • Malek86 #12 3 years ago

    I don't know if this guy is referring to just about every game. If it were like he said, no one would be making games for the Wii. They also wouldn't be making games for the 360/PS3 either. If a HD game like Overlord, with his 500.000 or so copies, is considered successful enough to grant several sequels, then I'm pretty sure his aim is too high, both for the Wii and the HD consoles.

    He is probably referring to big budget titles like Zelda and Mario, but almost no developer does games like that for the Wii.

    BTW, isn't this the guy who said that Disaster wouldn't be brought to the USA because it had... bad production values? And... crappy sound? Yeah. That. I still remember that. It's the total antithesis of what the Wii embodies, but hey, whatever suits him.

  • Cloud-Strife #13 3 years ago

    only 16 out of 468 were not shovelware...

    *claps hands slowly* Well done nintendo, well done...

  • Quak #14 3 years ago

    Wii games don't cost less to make because it doesn't display HD - they cost less to make because they are 5 minute mini-games.

  • JetSetWilly #15 3 years ago

    Shouldn't that be qualified to say that NPD figures are for North America only?

  • DutchDemons #16 3 years ago

    only 16 out of 468 were not shovelware...

    *claps hands slowly* Well done nintendo, well done...

    yes...very true. also note that these so called 'quality games' include wii play and such. not the type of game we wanted to see when we first heard about 'a new and unique motion sensored-nintendo console'.

  • Smoped #17 3 years ago

    Reggie was probably talking about these big budget games, with a $20 million budget one million sounds like a believable break-even point. As for how many Wii games actually have these kinds of budgets is another matter entirely. And Reggie was probably talking about global sales and the NPD numbers were for US sales. 7 non-Nintendo million-sellers can't be right. The two Guitar Hero games, two Resident Evils and three Raving Rabbids already make it seven, and then there are other known million-sellers like Carnival Games, Red Steel & Rock band and so on.

  • spitfire1945 #18 3 years ago

    let's do some simple math with the average cost that was shown in this article.

    18.8 million euros to make and market a title. Let's say that this game has a 45 euros price to retailers (then 5 euros charged by them, which don't count for the publisher, for a total of 50 euros).
    Then divide that 18.8M by 50 and you can see that it takes, roughly, only 417K of copies sold to return even!

    So screw that "one million copies has to be sold".

    e.g.: de Blob turned a profit way earlier than "the one million" threshold, which is not even close to it (700K at best)! And also, I don't think it costed 18.8 million either!

  • UncleLou #19 3 years ago

    You forgot the fat slice Nintendo takes. Amongst other things.

  • Malek86 #20 3 years ago

    spitfire: first of all, you have to take VAT into account (which is, in EU countries, much higher than in USA). That goes not to the publisher nor to the retailer. Also, the webmaster of a Lucasarts fansite once made an analysis of costs: he said that publishers take less than 50% of what remains after VAT is considered. Also, that money must be split between publisher and producer (or they can use royalties, which is probably the case).

    So, if a titles costs 60€ at the store, 12€ goes into VAT. The remaining 48€ is split something like 20€ to the publisher and 28€ to the retailer. So, if a title costed 20 millions to make, a publisher needs to sell a million copies to make even. The math works, so I guess the webmaster dude (and Reggie) is right.

    ... except that I'm pretty sure almost no games really cost 20 millions to develop. Especially not on the Wii. And on HD consoles as well. If Gears of War was reported by Epic itself to have costed 10 million dollars to make, I'm sure many other games will cost even less.

  • Darren #21 3 years ago

    "Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime has said Wii games don't start making money for their publishers until a million copies have been shifted."

    As others have said I find that very, very hard to believe seeing as the Wii is little more than a tweaked GameCube with a motion controller. The GameCube is a platform that is over six years old, very familiar to most developers I'd imagine and therefore comparatively much easier to develop for than the PC, 360 or PS3. Also, no exaggeration but seemingly about half the Wii's games are last gen ports so their development costs are significantly reduced, surely even if you factor in the hassle of reworking them to use the controller.

    The only way that statement could be true is if Nintendo are being greedy and taking a very large percentage of the sales and that wouldn't surprise me at all.

  • Darren #22 3 years ago

    "NPD figures show that of the 486 games release for Wii, just 16 have sold more than a million copies - and nine of those are Nintendo first-party titles."

    So, basically, this is admission that the Wii is a commercial flop despite the fact that the Wii has sold 50 million hardware units? It almost speaks volumes that the majority of those 16 games to sell over 1 million units are Nintendo's own games.

    That last fact doesn't surprise me at all as those are the only games worth buying on the Wii (apart from Wii Music, I mean no-one sane and over 10 would want to play that, right?) as it is otherwise a pretty poor games console IMO with little of interest on it despite the promise back in 2005 that the controller was going to revolutionise gaming. I'm betting the other million selling games were from EA.

    The irony is that one of the biggest selling game on the Wii, namely Wii Fit, would work just as well on the 360 and PS3 because it mostly make use of an additional peripheral, the Balance Board! Not only that but the Wii remote needs another peripheral, the accelerometer thing that's going to ship with Wii Sports 2, in order to make it responsive and accurate because too many games IMO suffer from unresponsive controls at the moment that ruin the experience.

  • Jasugun #23 3 years ago

    If you follow the logic, then 470 wii games were not profitable.
    Yeah, right, I can picture UBI Soft saying : 'come on, today we'll make another highly non profitable wii game!We're making games for the sake of it, it's Ok if we lose money on all of them!"

  • Darren #24 3 years ago

    Yeah, it does sound pretty dumb to admit that less than 1.5% of games make profits for the third-party (i.e. not Nintendo) publishers.

    I mean why would any third-party publisher make games for the Wii if that is true? I'm sure that Nintendo make money from them through the licence fee but if only 7 out of 486 third-party games make profits then there's something very, very wrong somewhere.

  • quantumsheep #25 3 years ago

    "So, basically, this is admission that the Wii is a commercial flop despite the fact that the Wii has sold 50 million hardware units? It almost speaks volumes that the majority of those 16 games to sell over 1 million units are Nintendo's own games."

    Does it? Does it really?

    Do you *actually* mean that the Wii is 'a flop' for anyone *other* than Nintendo? Because selling 50 million consoles at a profit, and churning out nine titles that sold over a million each, doesn't sound like flop-like behaviour to me.

    And isn't this *always* the case with Nintendo? That their games perform better on their platform than third parties do? Which, when you were looking at the GameCube's installed base, wouldn't have inspired much confidence in third parties. But with an installed base so large with the Wii, surely everyone *thinks* they're in with a chance of making a profit?
    Edited by 1 at 31/03/09 @ 13:58

  • Darren #26 3 years ago

    @quantumsheep - OK so perhaps my comment was badly worded and I should have said that it was admission that Wii *games* are a commercial flop since selling 50 million pieces of hardware that Nintendo have admiited was profitable from Day One is hardly a flop.

    With a user-base of 50 million people, that only 16 games have sold over a million units is quite shocking, nay disturbing, more so if you believe Nintendo's claims that the other 470 games have been non-profitable. It almost reads to me as if Wii owners don't buy many games really, something I know is certainly true for myself as my own Wii hasn't had a new game since June 2008!!!

    While Nintendo may be making lots of money on the hardware and the software licensing fees, it seems hard to believe that no-one other than themselves is, especially as it's the PS3, 360 and PC where the development costs are sky-high and where games have to sell over X million units to become profitable because of them. That supposedly so few games are profitable on the Wii is extremely hard to believe, which brings me back to my original comment.

    But then why would Reggie Fils-Aime lie? And why would he make a statement that makes the Wii look like a financial disaster for third-party publishers? Most odd.

  • Smoped #27 3 years ago

    By the way, Vgchartz lists about 50 Wii games as selling over million copies. That's still only about 10% of all Wii games, but I'd wager over 50% of Wii shovelware have tiny production budgets and next to no marketing budgets.

  • kingdumpalot #28 3 years ago

    To be fair, there are only about 16 games on Wii that are really worth owning. All the rest are wii sports ripoffs and shovelware. The games that are worthwhile sell lots. Except Okami.

    :(

  • Smoped #29 3 years ago

    And Zack & Wiki.
    Double :(

  • Malek86 #30 3 years ago

    So, NYT just stated they were wrong. Nintendo actually said that you need "fewer than a million copies" to make a profit. They still wouldn't release an actual number though.

    Well, I'd say an average of 20$ for a game is still a decent esteem, so if a game has a budget of about 4 millions (even a relatively low-budget game like NMH probably needs that much, since the credits show there was a big number of people working on it), you'd need 200.000 copies to make a profit. Much more manageable, neh? Indeed, NMH turned a profit, Marvelous said so.

    Still, even so, I say development costs have got too high, even on the Wii. Small publishers will be better around sticking to the DS.

  • Sean.Aaron #31 3 years ago

    Well, Reggie is saying he was misquoted and DUH, there are many factors in determining whether or not a game is profitable, so you cannot just pick a number out of the air like that.

    It would be nice if EG would do some follow-up rather than just reprint news from other sources as fact...