electronic-entertainment-design-and-research posts

Today's news of the delay of BioShock 2 to sometime in 2010 (along with other games like Max Payne 3 and Mafia II) might sound like it's bad news for the game's publisher Take Two Interactive. After all the game is missing the lucrative fall/holiday shopping season where over 50 percent of all game purchases are made.

Not so fast, says Jesse Divinich. According to Destructoid, the analyst at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research says Take Two's move to push back BioShock 2 and other games could be the best thing possible for the publisher. Divinich is quoted as saying, "I originally anticipated that Take-Two would outperform the industry in fiscal 2010. Now, I expect them to dominate fiscal 2010." He basis this move on the belief that the release of BioShock 2, Mafia II, Max Payne 3 and other Take Two games in this period "should make fiscal 2010 the year of Take-Two."

It looks like you can't trust anybody anymore. This weekend Forbes.com posted up a story claiming that just four percent of games that are released are actually profitable. The story was based on talking with the Electronic Entertainment Design and Research organization.

As it turned out, Forbes.com got it wrong. Our sister site GameDaily reports that EEDAR has sent over a correction to the article, saying that while four percent of games that start production make a profit the number jumps way up for games that are actually released. EEDAR says that number is a much higher 20 percent. While that is a much bigger number it still means that 80 percent of games release either don't make a profit or break even.

The game industry has been growing by leaps and bounds for the most part but a research firm claims that only 4 percent of games that make it to store shelves actually end up being profitable. This info from a Forbes.com article comes from the research firm Electronic Entertainment Design and Research.

Founded in 2006, the firm says it has worked with a number of major game publishers to determine if their upcoming games will become profitable. It uses a database of 6,000 games and a number of variables to figure out sales of a game, including genre, rating, projected release dates, the quality of a game's development team and more. According to EEDAR president Geoffrey Zatkin, "About 60 (percent) of a game's budget is spent reworking or redesigning a game. Armed with all this data, companies can make those tough calls early in the development process."