Marvelous Entertainment stuff
Marvelous Entertainment also made a post on the staff blog for Little King’s Story where they mentioned that games such as No more heroes, Rune Factory F, Oboromuramasa, Arc Rise Fantasia etc were all games that they have tried their best to make under very limited time and budget but all of these games have experienced similar shipment numbers, all of which are not very high. And he feels like crying.
But the writer also adds that despite the current bad market, games that sell are still selling really well, so it’s probably just a lack of ability on Marvelous Entertainment’s part.
They’re asking interested people to pre-order their upcoming game Little King’s Story, as it is apparently getting very little pre-orders, and retailers won’t even take their game for display in the shop if the pre-orders are bad.
Also Marvelous Entertainment related, they had a Q&A for their annual report which listed their average development costs for the high end consoles, and how European price protection schemes are killing them.
Q: It appears your company is making games for the high end game consoles such as the PS3 and the Xbox360, how much are the development costs and how much do you expect to sell? And what kind of game genres are you currently developing games for?
A: Development costs, on average, currently cost 50 to 60 million yen (US$600,000) for a PS2 title, and a PSP title would cost about 120 million yen (US$1,200,000). But for the high end game consoles it would cost about 3 times the amount of what it costs to make a PSP title. Just to recoup the development costs, we would need to sell at least 100,000 copies per title. As for the game genre, we are currently making action games and RPG-like games.
Q: The effects of the economic downturn is causing retailers to run low on funds and causing game prices to drop. How does your company plan to deal with these risks?
A: We have not seen much of the effects of the economic downturn in Japan, but we have been affected greatly overseas. Especially in Europe, where the retailers drop prices without informing the maker. And they would claim the price difference from the maker later, almost as if that is the way that everything is supposed work. We’re already charging extra to cover costs for the price protection, but past late last year the prices have dropped below what can be covered by the amount, badly affecting the profits for our subsidiary in Britain. For the current financial year, we’re starting to take more money to compensate for price protection.
Via: Marvelous Entertainment Annual Report 2009 (pdf)
