I dunno. If you check the eShop charts on any given day, about half or more are going be VC titles. Duck Hunt is currently the #1 recent best seller overall. Freakin' Duck Hunt.
Sorine said:
Reggie confirmed NA is by a wide margin the biggest VC market.
Just wanted to address both of these again, because neither of them actually mean that the Retro market is actually big enough to justify the expenses of bringing old game out. Especially on such a low install base of a platform. Those people hours are better spent deployed on larger projects. At least, that's how big publishers operate.
Now I would love to see a small 2 or 3 person studio work out royalty type contracts with these pubs, take on all the overheard, but also get the majority of the benefit and crank out like 20 or 30 VC titles. The key again would be Nintendo somehow working out something on the Wii to WiiU upgrade people.
I mean, if I could have three or four programmers, that I could pay kind of low, ~60k to 80k a year and I could lock up all the licensing and contracts I might take that bet. Again I would need to really see what kind of sales those things get.
Hypothetical, say we got the contracts on some SNES VC games, all $7.99, all sell 25k units in NA, granted I think this really high.
So $199,750 in raw revenue each.
-30% for Nintendo's Eshop take -$59,925
Subtotal $139,825
Then take another ~50% for licensing and other royalty fees to the publishers and other holders. so -$99,875
leaves roughly $39,950 give or take bring home.
So 4 Software Engineers, at roughly $80k, which is kind of cheap, but better than Indie salaries on average I would wager, you would need $320,000 in total profit to pay your people. So you would need ~11 games. That is just to be able to pay your people, not including other business expenses.
Is that a feasible hypothetical? I don't know, but a lot of publishers don't see it that way. Honestly Nintendo themselves should have a porting team like this in house and they should just use their leveraging power to make deal since they could probably just operate the team off the 30% they take off eshop sales.
I will freely admit I am just taking wild guesses here, and honestly, I don't think that VC titles regularly hit the 25k mark in sales if ever.
You would probably do better to make similar deals and put the games on GOG or Steam to be honest.