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Originally Posted by tysonK
I'd guess we would have to weigh the R&D for the two. The manufacturing costs must be higher for the wheel than the dvd the game is written on.
Maybe the best marketing would have been buy this wheel and get the game for free? It might cheapen the image of the game to throw it is as a free gift.
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Well, like I said, if the wheel costs (let's bump it up from my 1st guess to make the math easier) $50 to manufacture, package, and sell at $150, they make $100 per wheel. The game sells for $50, and probably costs $5 to manufacture, package, and sell (not counting the original programming costs which were in the millions).
Now let's assume they sold 2 million copies of the game, plus say 10% of the people that bought the game also bought the wheel, that's $90M + $20M = $110M.
Now let's say they bundle the game and wheel for $200, but only sell have as many games because of the high cost. That's $45M + $100M = $145M.
But that's really not the point. My point is that the game should be beat-able with either controller. But from a marketing perspective, if the car is faster with a wheel, you can sell more wheels because anyone that's going to run in a GT4 league will have to buy one to be competative. However, the GT4 programmers put a lot of code in there to assist the the dualshock. My guess is they were being philanthropic and trying to make sure no one has an advantage for the online play (which later got canned from GT4). The result is that a great driver w/ a dualshock runs faster lap times than a great driver with a wheel.
Of course, that all depends on the results of Nick's next attempt with his wheel. If he's able to match his dualshock times, then I'll agree that all of the above is bunk. However, I think I'm pretty damn good w/ a wheel on GT4 (I totally suck w/ a controller), and I don't think there's another 2 seconds per lap in this challenge to pick up. Sure there's a tenth here or there, maybe a total of 1 second, but not 2 seconds. So either Nick's just fucking superman at GT4 (which certainly is a possiblity and why I'd love to see an in-car video of his lap) or there's an inherrant advantage that comes from the dualshock assist.
So Nick, for posterity, we need you to match those 1'25's with the wheel! And record your laps man, setup your digi-cam on video mode and record a reply of your best lap to show us how you did it!