duckroll said:
MMV should just stick to publishing DS and PSP games this generation. There's no room for a publisher that can't afford to spend heavy on marketing in the console playing field right now in Japan. If they want to keep it up and continue whining, then I hope they either have a very rich individual investor in the company, or they like going out of business.
While MMV is lamenting their sales, I don't think they've actually said that they're losing money. Dalthien would know better than I since he keeps up with the financial reports thread, but I'm pretty sure MMV is not making losses.
poppabk said:
I'm talking less about niche titles selling more necessarily, more about having a level playing field where niche titles have a chance to get at least one chance to prove themselves. When you have publishers begging people to pre-order the game, because it is already a failure even though it hasn't been released yet, its pretty disturbing. If pre-orders determine whether people even get a chance to purchase games, then the sleeper hit becomes a thing of the past and word of mouth becomes useless.
Ummmm...I think you are misinterpreting what is being said. This is not about a game not being sold at all. We're talking about the difference between shops ordering 30k of your game in the first shipment vs 100k of your game. The difference between there being one or two copies in specialty shops, and their being a decent number of copies in general shops with higher foot traffic.
Word of mouth is still important, and a super niche game with a low print run can still be a breakout success if the 15k people who buy all the initial copies shout how awesome the game is from the high heavens and tell all their friends, who then run to their retailer and keep asking about it. It's pretty easy for a retailer to order another shipment of a game, but a publisher can't force a shipment on a retailer, unless, like we said earlier, they're someone huge like Square-Enix or EA.
Your earlier plan of no one doing pre-orders ever again might fix things eventually, but in the 6 months or so it would take anyone to notice and care, 100s of great games would fail and their publishers go bankrupt because even fewer of their games would make it to market. And retailers would still order a million copies of Halo: ODST day one, even without a single preorder, because they know it will sell. Stopping preorders hurts the small guys more than the big guys, so it really is a better system.
jay said:
I don't entirely understand why Gamestop has 500 copies of Orphen, Under the Skin, Future Tactics, Eternal Ring, Madden 97 and other $4.99 wonders occupying large sections of walls if retail space is so valuable. Is it just that even selling a $3 used game yields more profit than selling a new copy of Baroque?
Used games are nothing but profit, have a high turnover rate, don't require anything in the way of logistics (they can just be thrown in a bin). They're like a cheap money printing machine that GS uses until the disc breaks. A new game is only useful for how often it can be resold. I'm sure Gamestop hates me, because I don't buy used products, and I almost never sell anything.