this thread has strayed so far away from kwaad's original intention it's not even funny. we're comparing PS3/wii and perhaps 360 sales of same-titled games, not exclusives, since, you can't directly compare them. it's very hard to come up with numbers--every negotiation is different. to say the developer gets a cut of $18/game i doubt makes sense, since usually the developer gets paid upfront, and depending on the deal, gets a certain cut AFTER the game sells enough to make a profit. and then there the distribution costs, marketing costs, packaging, etc etc etc. plus who knows how much really goes into a game. it's impossible to know unless you've worked in the industry, and even then every situation is different. still, it's fun to speculate. $60--$12 markup for retailers sounds about right (20%). video games i think is known to have lower markup than a lot of other merchandises. $8.6 mil average: games like gundam certainly exceed this figure by a factor 2 or more. ports are obviously cheaper. now i have no idea if 360 --> Wii ports are really more expensive than a 360 --> PS3 port. Kwaad--how did you come up with the $500,000 and $2,000,000 estimates? 500,000 break-even point: certainly not every PS3 game. for gundam, maybe. then again gundam games are never known for their quality. who really knows other than the accountants. even then it's a whole mess. blu-ray: argue all you what, and even though you can't talk about blu-ray without mentioning ps3 and vice versa, it's again next to impossible to do your analysis. sony is a conglomerate. you need to know so much to know what strategy they're pursuing, like what numbers stringer used to convince the company (or decided unilaterally) to bundle blu-ray with PS3. gaming is but one division of sony... it ties in with so many other sony products i can't even think of a way to intelligently talk about numbers on blu-ray and PS3. moving away from hard numbers, however, there's no doubt PS3 is being used as leverage to promote blu-ray. the success of the PS3 itself is becomes less important. the above is also why a while back i had commented that the bundling blu-ray with PS3 the home hub is too risky of a bet for a company the size of sony. it's so big it shouldn't make that kind of bet. of course, that might be why stringer is the CEO--it's all about vision, and we'll find out if he's got the right vision. 4-6 mil for the "average" wii game: the average might be 4-6 mil, but the median i suspect is closer to the 1 mil range, 1.5-2mil seems like as good a number as any. does anybody know how much twilight princess cost to make? i'd estimate around 15 mil. how about Super paper mario? 10 mil? brawl? 12-15 mil? i mean, take Cooking Mama coming out soon. i can't imagine it costing much more than 1 million to develop. (not including licensing costs etc) 1.5 mil max. games like SSX, it seems 4-6 mil is a good estimate. what is it... EA's montreal studio... 30 people, programmers, designers, artists? generous $100k salary, generous 2 year development, that's 6 mil. plus overhead maybe 7 mil. royalties: $8-$12 reasonable. the N64 was like $11? the strange thing about royalties in video games is that apparently you pay it upfront for each unit manufactured, not each unit sold like in music. yeah, it sucks to be publishers of games that sell way below expectations.
the Wii is an epidemic.
