Aquamarine said:
Piggybacking on a conversation that you were having on GAF, RexNovis:
Star Fox Zero had a core development team (excluding localization costs and voice acting) of 139 people. Assuming they worked for an average of two years on the project per person and made an average salary of $70,000 each, that's $20 million in development costs. Add in $10 million for localization, voice acting, marketing, manufacturing, distribution, overhead, etc. That's $30 million in total to make Star Fox Zero.
Conservatively, Nintendo would break-even at Star Fox: Zero around 1 million units if the project has an average return of $30 per copy when you take into account retailer margins and other COG expenses. This echoes what Reggie Fils-Aime said back in 2009.
Star Fox Zero sold 100K in the USA at launch. Let's assume a generous digital share----150K in the USA when you include digital.
Now double that for Europe + Other and add 30K from Japan----and you get 330K sell-through worldwide for Star Fox Zero's first month.
I guarantee you that 330K is not enough to turn a profit...I imagine Nintendo shipped 500K of inventory...the unsold portion will just stagnate over time because historically the Star Fox series hasn't had the best legs.
So yeah...this is probably the end of Star Fox. 100K is a harbinger for the demise of the series. Nintendo isn't going to make another iteration of Star Fox if they lose money on this project.
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Isn't there a lot of crossover for employees at Nintendo? And 70k USD seems fairly high as an average for development team. No doubt these sales are disappointing for Nintendo, but that budget certainly seems pretty high. Compare that to a heavily marketed, cutting edge tech game like Witcher 3 which had four years of dev time, a dev team of 250, and a massive marketing budget but only cost 80m USD.
Also, the fact that a dev team of 140 with two years dev team put out such an ugly, short, half-baked embarassment of a game is a bit baffling. Nintendo's internal studios have really fallen from grace, as has that hack Miyamoto.
