Massive Price Drop!

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Coldcall

If you are correct with that figure then that blows my mind, because 200,000 sales at $50 per sale is $10million. Ubisoft would have a great margin in that case and the fact they complain is unbeleivable. It also indicates the blatant profiteering they have engaged in by releasing these games early. There was clearly no need as the profit marguin was huge. They could have simply taken 2 more months to QA the game. At the rates you menntioned that would have cost them an extra few tens of thousands, nothing compared to the ROI.

I dont think its such an easy calculation. Most of Ubisoft's sales are to retailers who negotiate a price based on their network and the potential sales, so I would say a average sales price by Ubi between say $15-25 may make more sense. Perhaps more on the lower end, since some retailers seem to already be dumping their stocks. Since some retailers seem to be accepting returns with no hassle, I presume they also have a deal to get a refund from Ubi.

Sales of sh3 were around 200,000, sales of sh4 were around 100,000 total. If sales of SH5 are only as high as, say sh4, which seems a reasonable assumption. We have gross revenues of $1,500,000 to $2,500,000. From that you have to detect salary, marketing and other costs at Ubi corporate, so even if they only paid say 500k to Ubi Romania, we are still not talking about a huge profit.

When you look at it this way, it also shows why Ubi acts the way they do. The keep the development cost and time to a minimum to be certain to turn a profit.

Obviously if they had more sales, they could afford to spend more money on it.

[Jonin]

Still showing 49$ for Amazon in the US. I'm not buying it because of the DRM, but if it drops down low enough, I may give it a shot. If they'd just drop that DRM, I'd go out and get it today.

[Nordmann]

Originally Posted by Jonin

Still showing 49$ for Amazon in the US. I'm not buying it because of the DRM, but if it drops down low enough, I may give it a shot. If they'd just drop that DRM, I'd go out and get it today.

Indeed, give it some time, the US Amazon tends to be somewhat slow to catch on. I don't know what it is about the States, but you always seem to get hit with higher prices for games than here in the UK, at least in my experience. Tax perhaps?

[Coldcall]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

I dont think its such an easy calculation. Most of Ubisoft's sales are to retailers who negotiate a price based on their network and the potential sales, so I would say a average sales price by Ubi between say $15-25 may make more sense. Perhaps more on the lower end, since some retailers seem to already be dumping their stocks. Since some retailers seem to be accepting returns with no hassle, I presume they also have a deal to get a refund from Ubi.

Sales of sh3 were around 200,000, sales of sh4 were around 100,000 total. If sales of SH5 are only as high as, say sh4, which seems a reasonable assumption. We have gross revenues of $1,500,000 to $2,500,000. From that you have to detect salary, marketing and other costs at Ubi corporate, so even if they only paid say 500k to Ubi Romania, we are still not talking about a huge profit.

When you look at it this way, it also shows why Ubi acts the way they do. The keep the development cost and time to a minimum to be certain to turn a profit.

Obviously if they had more sales, they could afford to spend more money on it.

Absolutely, the figures are very fluid in that we dont know exactly what the average per copy sale is when taking into account all costs, promotions etc..

But even worst case scenario they are making money even on the lesser 100,000 estimate. And if SH4 only sold 100,000 then clearly it made them money because they returned 2/3 years after with this release.

Anyways, my point being, any suitably committed and *experienced* dev team could produce a profit making subsim. And further if it was less concerned about impatient demands from its corproate paymasters it would likely release a less buggy initial product. QA could be almost totally outsourced to a group of subsimmers who would put the game through its paces better than any internal qa teams.

Another thing i was wondering is what development project methodology thise guys are using in Romania. If they switched to an Agile approach you sort of betatest on the hoof incrementally as the software sort of evolves. Very darwinian approach to software dev. Im not a techiwe but i sel Agile consultancy services to corp devlopment teams working on B2b applications. Software devloped with Agile techniques instead of the old Prince 2 PPMs, are way more robust even at beta stage before qa testing on finalised build.

Anyways would love to see a break way occur just because even if Ubi continue doing a SH series, they need some competition and we will end up with a bettr subsim from one or the others.