Nintendo already helped them. It didn't work.Teetris said:Fuck this. And Nintendo doesn't even want to help them? Fuck them
CING RIP
upandaway said:Well... shit. And the creator was so excited about Little King's Story 2...
Zero-Crescent said:Are these bankruptcy proceedings aimed at achieving Rehabilitation, or is it a Liquidation proceeding? I was trying to read a bit on Japan's bankruptcy law to find out what the options are over there (All I've read so far was this).
Interesting, $2.5 million in debt, and I believe OP site says they only had $100,000 in capital.
Big One said:I hope Town Factory is up for finishing that mention LKS sequel a while back. What happened with that anyway?
Actually just in Japan Another Code sold > 100K and Hotel Dusk > 200K however Last Window and especially Another Code R bombed quite hard.Jackson said:I've been waiting for this for awhile. I was scratching my head about how CING has stayed in business this long after every single one of their titles (as far as I've seen) were a commercial flop. You're not going to make any money as a developer selling under 200k of your DS titles and under 100k of your Wii titles.
Why would this be a "smart" investment for Nintendo? What would Nintendo get out of this besides a developer that has DEMONSTRATED that it cannot pay for itself?Gunloc said:I hope that they are going to reorganize their assets and try to reopen, or if Nintendo was smart they would bail them out. A small company like this would be an easy acquisition. Though I think it would be fair to say that Nintendo is partially responsible for their situation by the lack of advertising and blocking key releases from getting world wide releases.
loosus said:Why would this be a "smart" investment for Nintendo? What would Nintendo get out of this besides a developer that has DEMONSTRATED that it cannot pay for itself?
loosus said:Why would this be a "smart" investment for Nintendo? What would Nintendo get out of this besides a developer that has DEMONSTRATED that it cannot pay for itself?
While I agree with you that calling it a "smart" move is a stupid thing to say, you have to be fair... marketing skills and development skills are different things.loosus said:Why would this be a "smart" investment for Nintendo? What would Nintendo get out of this besides a developer that has DEMONSTRATED that it cannot pay for itself?
TheOneGuy said:While I agree with you that calling it a "smart" move is a stupid thing to say, you have to be fair... marketing skills and development skills are different things.
First, what is "direction?" That's an extremely broad term. That sounds like, basically, you're saying that Nintendo needs to tell them to stop making the games that they actually know how to make and start making something more mainstream -- thus, why "save" CING to begin with?ICallItFutile said:Nintendo could give them direction?
Well that's kind of my point.duckroll said:But Cing doesn't do any marketing, because they don't publish any of their own games...
TheOneGuy said:Well that's kind of my point.
A lot of people agree their games are good. So blaming them for publishers' poor marketing...
Yesss... that's why I saidduckroll said:Guess who their biggest publisher is? Nintendo! Lolz.
...... marketing skills and development skills are different things.
The first Hotel Dusk did well in the US. Since then NoA has done nothing to support any future releases from the CING. How is a company supposed to recoup their loses if the company that publishes their games won't even release them in the largest video game market in the world?loosus said:Why would this be a "smart" investment for Nintendo? What would Nintendo get out of this besides a developer that has DEMONSTRATED that it cannot pay for itself?
duckroll said:Guess who their biggest publisher is? Nintendo! Lolz.
I disagree. The Nintendo logo nowadays is not nearly enough to convince someone to pick up a game. Unless it has Mario (or other popular mascots )on the cover, the Nintendo brand means very little to the uninformed gamer.loosus said:Marketing is not the problem, anyway. People saw the games and didn't want them. Hell, have the Nintendo logo right on the box was a huge marketing tool in and of itself; it got people -- who would otherwise not give these games another look -- to give their games a try.
People just do not want these games, and there is really no other excuse. Perhaps these games sold well for the genre, but that's not necessarily enough. You have to budget these games according to the market they are aiming for, and CING apparently did not do that.
duckroll said:Another Code (Trace Memory) sold over 100k in Japan. (2005)
Hotel Dusk sold over 200k in Japan. (2007)
These are fantastic sales for Nintendo and for Cing. But things have gotten really bad since then.
Another Code R was released last year on the Wii, it sold a mere 10k. Hotel Dusk 2 was released on the DS in January this year, and has sold a measly 30k so far. Again was released in December last year as well, and it sold so badly it didn't even chart in the top30, and the only numbers I can find indicate it sold a mere 900 copies on the first day.
That's how badly things have gotten for Cing in the last 3 years.
duckroll said:Again was released in December last year as well, and it sold so badly it didn't even chart in the top30, and the only numbers I can find indicate it sold a mere 900 copies on the first day.
Exactly. It's like, "Oh, yeah, we made a new Hotel Dusk... And it was released yesterday."mooooose said:Hotel Dusk 2 might have sold better if it wasn't announced like three weeks before it was released. Y'know, if it was marketed and hyped.
Another Code: R is a weird situation where I think the fanbase for the games is more on DS than on Wii, so that's a bomb that's understandable.
But really, both of these games could have been marketed to sell. It seems like Nintendo threw them out expecting the weight of them being sequels of successful games would be enough. They'd release, word of mouth would spread, and they'd do similar numbers.