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What is the biggest financial failure in all of video gamedom?
- Thread starter Exellus
- Start date
Another funny comparison: PS4 has already made more profit than PS1 and PS2 combined and it will not even be close once the gen is over.
Sony sold the PS3 as a subsidized Blue Ray player, in order to win the Blue Ray/HD DVD war which they did. As Blue Ray won you can't call it a failure.
While on paper sony made a loss on the PS3 on paper it was really a very expensive marketing strategy.
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Also ET never "killed the industry" the industry was thriving in Japan and Europe. It only caused a crash in North America.
I'd be interested to see the final breakdown, seeing as a lot of the development costs covered Shenmue II as well.
What was undoubtedly a big loss, though, was Shenmue Online. Their Korean partner pulled out and I think Sega ended up footing most of the $25 million for an MMORPG that never saw release:
Sony would have had all that with a less obtuse and over-engineered console, just not making a massive loss in the process.
Sega's issues pre-date the Saturn and it was really just a symptom more than a cause of their downfall. It actually did pretty well in Japan and overall the system actually had over 1000 releases. That's more than the Mega Drive and almost 3x more than the N64.
I think retailers basically revolted after it recieved a toxic reception by the public
I honestly don't think it's that big of a deal because it only affected the US. From what I know, video games were still doing hunky dory in Japan and Europe
To simplify it, too many crappy games - buyers lost interest and stopped buying video games. Crashed the industry in 1983.
That's... not what happened there. Big Huge Games made a decent game with decent sales on a realistic budget.
38 Studios executives siphoned millions of dollars off the MMO budget for themselves and their personal projects. Project Copernicus was vaporware. They constantly scrapped the majority of the game, had Star Citizen levels of feature creep and scope bloat, overpaid for basically everything, had insane bonus packages and perks for everyone to try to get west coast developers to move to Rhode Island.
It's hardly fair to blame the shuttering of 38 Studios on the only successful product their satellite studio produced when their gross mismanagement of the MMO is well documented and has basically no connection to the finances of Big Huge Games.
It didn't, it was just the straw that broke the camel's back for Atari after plenty of other bad decisions.
And even then that only affected USA. Europe and Japan were unaffected, as both had their own ecosystems.
Lmao the largest market going under is definitely a big deal.
So overall Sega lost 1.4 between four years, that makes sense!
The US wasn't the biggest market at the time (and wouldn't be that until the NES).
how exactly?
Wasn't just ET. That was just a huge failure in it's own right, to the point where Atari buried thousands of copies in the desert.
No, back then there was no control or regulation on what was released on those systems. Atari systems were full of absolute garbage that often didn't even work correctly, including porn games. All this lead to a lack of interest in videogames in the US i.e. the videogame crash.
This is also why the NES looks like a VCR and was heavily promoted with R.O.B. - to convince retailers to stock it and disassociate it from the videogame systems that came before. Nintendo also cracked down on what could and couldn't be released on their platform, and created the Nintendo Seal of Quality so consumers knew they were getting an actual functional piece of software (regardless of actual quality).
The uDraw was not a disaster on the Wii. It was after porting to PS3 and 360 that killed the company.
THQ details full extent of uDraw disaster
Revenue from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of THQ's uDraw tablet peripheral was a staggering $100 million bel…
www.eurogamer.net
No? Atari was pretty huge here and so were arcades, but I guess not as big as when NES hit the scene.
The uDraw was not a disaster on the Wii. It was after porting to PS3 and 360 that killed the company.
THQ details full extent of uDraw disaster
Revenue from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of THQ's uDraw tablet peripheral was a staggering $100 million bel…
Ahh, I'm remembering it in the wrong direction.
Success on the Wii, then they just filled a warehouse full of ports that never sold.
Gotcha.
Hard to believe THAT is the thing that obliterated THQ
$100M below projections, god damn.
Of course the PS3 cost billions to Sony.Digital infrastructure happened for every system that generation, it's not like it was a groundbreaking feature. I'm not sure what studio build-up has to do with the success of franchises on PS4. You can put all the context you want but it doesn't change this fact:
It doesn't change the fact that it was during the same period that changes were made, tied to the PS3's capabilities, that led to Sony's biggest profits ever, from online to studios to VR on PS4, but also that before the end of the PS3 gen Sony was back in profits. Sony also sold +/- 90m PS3, which compounded the success of the nascent digital sales for Sony.
It also doesn't change the fact that the Saturn led to ultimately Sega's exit from the hardware market entirely (and almost went bankrupt), while Sony is thriving.
I thought the Wii U sold poorly, right? I remember hearing that it didn't do well, but Nintendo had enough money in the bank to recover. Wasn't it also one of the reasons why the Switch came in to replace the Wii U fairly soonish?
It was more a different market than the largest. A lot of what was being made/sold in Europe and Japan didn't even apply to it.
The thing about Wii U was that they sold a good amount of first party games, maybe that alone stopped them from going in the red. Also the 3DS was doing pretty good. I think the only year Nintendo lost a lot of money was in the Year of Luigi.
The PS3 was a gigantic commercial failure, no matter how much spin you try to put around it. The fact that they completely abandoned the architecture for PS4 is proof enough that everything about the PS3 was a waste of time, money, and resources. Units sold, they went from being the undisputed market leader to solidly third place until both Wii and Xbox 360 were out of gas.
Sega's problems existed way before the Saturn, most notably the infighting between Sega of Japan and Sega of America over which system they should throw their weight behind.
Kingdom of Amalur cost Rhode Island taxpayers like $28million of failed bond loan payments from Curt Schilling's 38Studios. He claims to have lost $50million in the investment in his studio to make that game, but I suspect a lot of that is bull shit.
en.wikipedia.org
Probably not *the biggest financial failure* but a pretty good one insofar as fucking taxpayers had to bailout the studio.
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I don't think that the PS3 is valid here. Ultimately, Sony turned a profit on the PS3. Even if the console itself was a failure in terms of Sony's market position in 2005 and then Sony's market position in 2013, ultimately Sony made money through hardware and software sales from the PS3. A lot of the market position that Sony is in today with the Playstation 4 was built through the PS3, as well. People chalking up losses at Sony from 2005-2012, it's not as if Sony could have just "Taken off the console generation from 2005-2012" and then be in the position they're in today.
Examples like E.T. for Atari 2600 (?) are more valid because they contributed to the collapse of Atari, and Atari never really recovered to where they were. For instance, it's not like E.T. built into the success of Atari with the Jaguar, or something, no, the Jaguar was also not a success, and Atari as a game publisher had some small time success in the 90s with a few titles, but they were never in the position that they were in in 1980s.
38 Studios - Wikipedia
Probably not *the biggest financial failure* but a pretty good one insofar as fucking taxpayers had to bailout the studio.
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I don't think that the PS3 is valid here. Ultimately, Sony turned a profit on the PS3. Even if the console itself was a failure in terms of Sony's market position in 2005 and then Sony's market position in 2013, ultimately Sony made money through hardware and software sales from the PS3. A lot of the market position that Sony is in today with the Playstation 4 was built through the PS3, as well. People chalking up losses at Sony from 2005-2012, it's not as if Sony could have just "Taken off the console generation from 2005-2012" and then be in the position they're in today.
Examples like E.T. for Atari 2600 (?) are more valid because they contributed to the collapse of Atari, and Atari never really recovered to where they were. For instance, it's not like E.T. built into the success of Atari with the Jaguar, or something, no, the Jaguar was also not a success, and Atari as a game publisher had some small time success in the 90s with a few titles, but they were never in the position that they were in in 1980s.
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The 2600 porn games were obscurities in super limited quantities. I don't think they had any effect at all on industry sales. That's just one of many myths about the crash.
I also don't think a lack of regulation matters as other areas of entertainment, including computers of the time, survive just fine without first-party overlords. The amount of shovelware on 2600 doesn't seem any worse than GBC or Wii to me.
Where Atari really fucked up was massively overproducing cartridges which is why that landfill situation happened (which when partially unearthed it was revealed to have more than just ET but also well received games).
Star Citizen seems to be making a ton of money. I would call Star Citizen a lot of things (despite being excited to play it one day) but financial failure is not one of them.
I remember reading that they produced significantly more copies of ET than there were Atari consoles in homes at the time. Genius stuff.
I meant financial failure more in the sense of massive budget, resulting in no product.
It was also the straw that broke the camel's back, not the single game that caused the crash. It was on top of a ton of lax quality control for Atari games at the time.
Isn't the full stoy that the movie actually made a good chunk of change once it left theaters?I'm talking about about largest difference between money IN vs. money OUT. Something that companies spent A LOT on and failed massively.
One I think of is this:
As it nearly destroyed Square and is one of the big reasons Sakaguchi eventually left the company.
But I have to believe there's even bigger failures out there.
One could argue that ff14 was almost equally bad for SE....for all the damage it did to the development pipeline of the Square part of the company
Gizmondo is probably on this list. They spent millions and it sold less than 25k copies. Was part of what lead to Tiger Electronics bankruptcy.
Was Sony not expecting to make a profit on the PS3 at all? If they lost billions even after selling 80 million, I'm guessing the plan was instead for Blu-Ray and Cell to take off, of which only the former did?
Yep, Blu Ray won the battle against HD DVD, all while the consumer market transitioned directly from DVD to Streaming.
It was Reckoning. Reckoning had the EA Publishing deal, and actually sold pretty well.
Enough they were interested in a sequel at the time, though EA sort of struggled with how it fit into their portfolio.
They had an MMO in the works in the Amalur world, and this thing just devoured cash and they weren't close enough to ship it.
Plus, by then the MMO market was shifting away from their business model and the company went belly
The answer to this question is the Xbox platform, and it isn't even close. The original console lost about as many billions as PS3 while selling 60m units fewer. They started the 360 generation by losing billions more, only getting into the black briefly on the back of Kinect.
They've never revealed any profit or loss numbers for Xbox One, so we can't say if the Xbox division has ever managed to break even over its 20-year history. Live subs are making major revenue, but we do know Microsoft has also been subsidizing Xbox One to the tune of billions. The always-online 180, hardware price deals, bundling and exclusivity deals, $1 XGP, etc. may mean Xbox still has net losses.
Of course, this doesn't matter so much for a parent corporation as huge as Microsoft. But the question was biggest financial failure in games. And the answer is Xbox.
They've never revealed any profit or loss numbers for Xbox One, so we can't say if the Xbox division has ever managed to break even over its 20-year history. Live subs are making major revenue, but we do know Microsoft has also been subsidizing Xbox One to the tune of billions. The always-online 180, hardware price deals, bundling and exclusivity deals, $1 XGP, etc. may mean Xbox still has net losses.
Of course, this doesn't matter so much for a parent corporation as huge as Microsoft. But the question was biggest financial failure in games. And the answer is Xbox.
PS3. it wiped all the profits SIE had made with PS2 (the best selling console of all time). i don't think anything else can match that.
The PS3 had to have an absolutely massive price cut to salvage the platform, which is where a lot of the bleeding came from. They expected the system to be a success at $600