Tag Archives: Geoffrey Zatkin

Research firm EEDAR has said that over half of Xbox 360 owners have bought a downloadable title.

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An EEDAR rep has claimed that boss Geoffrey Zatkin was misquoted by Forbes last week in an article that said only 4 percent of games ever make a profit.

“This was just a big mistake,” EEDAR told Edge.

“What Geoffrey said was that only 20 percent of games that start production will end up with a finished product. And of that percentage of finished games, 20 percent will make a profit.”

Apparently everything else from the article’s correct, though.

Thank God for that.

In an interview with Forbes, EEDAR president Geoffrey Zatkin has claimed that only a tiny portion of games on the market ever see the greener side of life.

EEDAR sells data on specific gaming features to the liks of EA, Ubisoft, and so in, in an effort to maximise chances of finding eventual money.

From the piece:

“Every game I have ever worked on, we’ve gone in blind as to which features would sell the game better,” says Zatkin, who designed games for 11 years before co-founding EEDAR. Not knowing whether it would be worth an extra $500,000 to design a multiplayer mode “would scare the crap out of me,” he says.

Only 4% of games that make it to market actually make a profit, he says. About 60% of a game’s budget is spent reworking or redesigning a game.

Ever wonder why games are so prone to “sequelitis”? Now you know.

Research firm EEDAR has announced GamePulse, a web-based information trade data service, launching in 2009.

“Despite the video game industry being near recession proof, increasing development costs and overall competition in the marketplace demand that investors, publishers and developers intensify their due diligence if they wish to maintain profit levels”, said EEDAR chief Geoffrey Zatkin.

“With its extensive data coverage, detailed analytics and ability to converge numerous data sources into a single application, GamePulse delivers fast, accurate and meaningful insight to the many issues which must be addressed during the greenlight, development and marketing stages of a video game’s production.”

Full release after the break. Get more details from EEDAR’s site.

By Mike Bowden

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