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Originally posted by: vudu
There is no minimum sales requirement to qualify as Player's Choice (back in the N64 days it was 1 million units).
However, Nintendo should definitely NOT make RE4 Player's Choice until after Christmas. They don't want to piss off Capcom.
Actually, that's not how it works. Nintendo can't tell a publisher how much they can charge for a game. That's called "price fixing", and it's illegal (and Nintendo learned that the hard way).
Nintendo simply charges a royalty fee, which is about $10 in this generation, and the publisher needs about $5 to get eaten up by all the middlemen (shipping, retail, that kind of thing), and then beyond that everything is entirely up to the publisher. They can set the MSRP at $20 and only make $5 per-game, or they can charge $100 and earn $85. It's all up to the publisher. Even if they usually just charge $50.
In the N64 days, Nintendo said that if you sold 1 million units, you could get a break on the royalties, but considering that the royalties were something like $35 (because of carts) it wasn't very popular, because you'd have to invest something like $35 million just to get a royalty rate that was still an absurd joke compared to what you could pay on the PlayStation.
For the newer systems, the royalty is like $10, and if you
agree to sell your game for less than $50, and you meet some stupid stupid "shipment" quota (it's supposedly something pathetic like 50,000 units, at which point it almost doesn't exist), then you can get a $2-5 break on the royalty, and Nintendo will slap a "Best Seller" or "Player's Choice" tag on your game. I think that Nintendo still can't
make a publisher sell the game for less than $50 at that point, but the ugly logos on the box will prevent anyone from paying full price for the game, should the publisher decide to lie to Nintendo.
Nintendo actually has two levels of "discount" games. The first has a
"Best Seller" logo on it, and you're supposed to charge $40 or less for those, and the other has those yellow bars on it, and you're supposed to charge $30 or less for those ones.
Basically, if a publisher
wants their game to go Player's Choice, it can.
As long as Capcom still thinks they can still sell some copies of RE4 on the PS2 at full price, they aren't gonna make up any cheaper GameCube versions and undermine the sales of the PS2 version. They'll most likely drop the price of the PS2 version before the GameCube one, just to try and keep the "excitement level" up.
Topic: New North American (NPD) Sales Thread (Read 103997 times)
