By Bryce Yang

It is quite frequent publishers lose money during this period and during the year, but bank on the holiday to put the companies into the black.  For Midway, their losses during this period were largely due to both development costs for titles in the works, and the fact that they only had 1 release the whole quarter, which is really, really light.  Their next quarter should be stronger with the release of Unreal Tournament III, which missed the quarter a bit. 

As for TNA Impact, from what I’ve played, the game is solid.  It’s closer to the highly regarded WWE games on N64 than the WWE SD vs Raw titles have been.  Whether or not they can capture WWE fans is another question.  SD vs Raw is a monster each year, one of the top franchises in the industry.  If we said that TNA is as popular as the UFC was in 2000 or so, that would not bode well for the product.  Of course, they have TV so it’s a bit different from UFC 2000, and also because wrestling fans have been given regular quality gaming product for the last 20 years. 

I recall you writing about the crossover of WWE fans who might purchase the TNA gaming product, I believe 10%.  To put this into perspective (ballpark), WWE SD vs Raw 08 has sold $104 million dollars worth of 2.2 million units in NA alone since Nov 07.  You can assume worldwide it may be nearly double that.  If TNA gets 10% of the WWE gaming fanbase, that’s about 440k units or $20 million or so in revenue, not including the % that goes to retail and other overhead costs. 

 {plug}