In the interview Marketing Manager Colin Ferris did with Gamedaily he says that Zack & Wiki didn't make money.

Quote:  The games business is filled with titles that people love that simply did not make money: Viewtiful Joe. Okami. Zack and Wiki.

Can someone else confirm that, cause I have a hard time believing that. In the earningsrelease in January 2008 Capcom stated that through December 2007 Zack & Wiki sold 300,000 copies. This is before the European release. Let's say that 200,000 copies are sold in 2008 (seems realistic with the European release and some additional American and Korean sales).

Then we're at 500,000 units. I think around $20,- per sold copy goes to the publisher so total revenue for the game should be around 10million. I might be wrong here, but I hope Capcom didn't make a point & click adventure (an amazing one, but still an unpopular genre) for that amount of money.  

Obviously I don't have the exact numbers for income and sales, but as a rough estimate I think I'm quite close.

Jan 28, 2009 -- 2:08AM, Sven wrote:

I won't get into details (because I can't... that's for investor relations only) but your assumptions are a ways off.

Ways off? Hmm.

I understand you can't go into detail and don't expect that, I'm only asking whether Zack & Wiki indeed lost money (that might already be too much detail, though) as claimed in the interview. Especially since it was named a "highlight" in the Q3 2007 earnings press release.

As a minimum case we have 300,000 units sold reported by Capcom. Again I might have the figures wrong but shouldn't a title like Zack & Wiki at least break even at that amount of sales? (THQ seems very happy with US sales of 230,000 for de Blob).

The revenue per copy for the publisher is an estimate based on Forbes' claim that ~$28 per sold game (at $60 retail price) goes to the publisher. Obviousy I can't say whether this is the case for Capcom or whether Forbes is even right, but I would be surprised if it's lower than $20.

So that leaves me to think that the main figure I have wrong is the development + publishing cost, which I understand is confidential.

It sold 500k with zero advertising on a platform that is popular among casuals and has a ridiculous amount of cutesy games

Capcom are lucky that it sold half a million. Coupled with their cheap ports and rehashes they've sold about 3 million units of software for the wii with minimum effort

According to vgchartz it sold:

Japan     30K

America 350K

Europe 160K

Which total to 540K worldwide.

Can you possibly post correct numbers, Sven?

Jan 28, 2009 -- 9:43AM, Sven wrote:

It did not sell 500K units or anywhere near it. I still don't understand where you're getting 500K.

To the best of my knowledge, the 300K figure quoted by IR included European orders from Nintendo who published the title on our behalf in that territory. Nor did it do the volume it did do at anywhere near frontline pricing (in the US anyway).

And what you think was a cheap game to make, wasn't. Great games almost never are.

I was talking about your constant stream of ports and rehashes being cheap. Lets face it Dead Rising chop til you drop and your 20 resident evil games cant have cost too much to make

Zack and Wiki obviously wasnt cheap being as it's your only good original game on the Wii although it stil probably cost about a third of  your HD games. But it had a stupid title and Zero marketing so you cant really complain especially given that it was released so early in the console's life and there is nothing to distinguish it from NinjaBread Man 2 for the average casual