I don't think this indicates any trouble for gaming companies or portends to a crash that games just out 2-3 months are now less than $20. The same thing last year happened with Beyond Good & Evil, XIII, Gladius, Goblin Commander, Sphinx, Top Spin, Links 2004, Grabbed By the Ghoulies and Ubisoft, Microsoft, Jaleco, Lucas Arts and THQ are all in business.
Outrun 2 was a system port that Microsoft distributed. It probably cost less than $2 million to port it, print them and distrubute 300,000 of them. Even if they all sell at $20 that's a $6 million game and a $4 million profit.
KUF,from looking at the credits am I wrong to think that this game was a Korean PC game? Again, do the above model. Let's say MS localized it and incurred an additional $1 million in costs for translations and new voice work. 300,000 shipped all sold at $20. You're looking at a $6 million game and a $3 million profit from this title.
Tron 2.0, same thing. You have an 18 month old PC game, they did nothing to optimize it for Xobx (Notice the shitty load times.) and could have had Digipen grads mod a few levels for Live, 200,000 sold for $20.... $4 million when they didn't really do squat but pay for the discs.
Price drops don't mean people aren't making money. Besides, I'm excluding the fact that most of the titles listed sold for full boat to retailers. No one lost money on these games, they were just singles instead of home runs.
There aren't many games that had a big budget, huge expectations and then failed miserably. Shenmue is probably the biggest single failure of a game commercially in history given its reported $50 million budget.
The gaming industry doesn't seem to throw out a Cutthroat Island, Waterworld, Ishtar or Gigli very often where not only does the product suck ass but it loses money too.
