Bankai wrote:
Ken's Rage 2 is going to sell a couple of thousand copies on the Wii U across all western territories. At most.
Putting a game on a download network still incurs some costs, and that's before you need to take into account the less straightforward costs, such as the time that the marketing teams spent on the game (and there has been some social media attention and press release activity around the game, and yes journalists are being provided with review copies). A few thousand copies at profit margins of a couple of percentage points.
Tecmo Koei was wise to charge a premium, as the only people who were ever going to buy the game were the people who would buy it at premium price. No sense in dropping the price to sell a couple of dozen extra copies to the fence sitters across the world.
I really wish that consumers (gamers, whatever you want to call yourselves) would actually work in a company and be responsible for setting prices before they assume they know about setting prices for products.
For the record, I don't count myself a "gamer" and I'm not living in some fantasy world. I have run a number of businesses in the last twenty years. A lot of what you say is exactly what I was saying - is the higher price on the Wii U (note it's higher on the Wii U, no one's asking for a discount, just parity) justified by the extra development & distribution costs entailed. I tried asking the original question in a different way to get people to look at it differently. I guess your rant could either suggest I succeeded or that I failed miserably.
I'd also add one salient point you didn't mention: launching now, at a time when the Wii U still has a relatively small library of games and the release schedule is slow, it will probably pick up more sales than it would do releasing at any other time (as a proportion of install base, which, of course, at this point is still small, so it's kind of a moot point).
