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Poor selling WiiWare titles receive no revenue?

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DVDBack23 @ Apr 16, 2009 05:47 | 4 comments

According to a Gamasutra report, indie developers who create titles to sell via WiiWare have to sell a significant amount of the game to receive any revenue from Nintendo.

The minimum number of sales is said to be in the "high four figure number for the US and low four figure number for individual EU territories," and if those numbers are not hit then the developer will not make one cent.

It is being speculated that the threshold was set so high to stop waves of shovelware titles from hitting the service, but it is believed that many titles, even hit titles, are selling far below initial expectations.

Nintendo dismissed the report saying the sales threshold report is "rumour and speculation. The terms, conditions and contracts between Nintendo and developers are a private and confidential matter."

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Comments

Comment by: ZippyDSM (Apr 16, 2009 07:03)

That's not good it also fcks over sales/profit for everyone on the revenue stream but Nintendo of coarse.

It should be simple brake down of the drops that come in to form the profit stream. If they have to add servers so be the WII raked in and rakes in enough profit to expand servers while allowing devs to gain some profit off slow and stagnant sales.

If nin got 15-30% of a title and they pushed 10 thousand 10$ games that's 15-30K in profit for nin on sales alone.

I mean really..... "stop waves of shovelware titles from hitting the service" the whole Gdamn console is built on sholveware.....

Comment by: xnonsuchx (Apr 16, 2009 07:59)

Even a lot of 3rd party developers don't want to invest too much into Wii retail game development. Besides the Nintendo-owned titles, very few other do that well...and Nintendo is supposedly not very helpful to them. It even looks like the Wii 'fad' is waning...now that there are plenty of units to sell!

Comment by: bomber991 (Apr 16, 2009 10:57)

Originally posted by xnonsuchx:
Even a lot of 3rd party developers don't want to invest too much into Wii retail game development. Besides the Nintendo-owned titles, very few other do that well...and Nintendo is supposedly not very helpful to them. It even looks like the Wii 'fad' is waning...now that there are plenty of units to sell!

It's hard to say if it was a fad really. Could the sales be stopping because of the bad economy? 5 years from now when we look back at this generations console sales numbers, is the Wii still going to be the dominant seller?

It would make perfect sense for all 3rd part developers to make some great games for the wii. I mean, the most consoles sold means there's the most potential gamers out there. I think the big problem is that the demographic of the wii isn't a typical one. It's a party toy like a hookah, it's a personal relax machine like a little bong, it's not a direct injection of something-something like the 360 and PS3 are.

Comment by: Hopium (Apr 16, 2009 12:16)

Originally posted by ZippyDSM:
I mean really..... "stop waves of shovelware titles from hitting the service" the whole Gdamn console is built on sholveware.....

amen