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JWeinCom said:
What's the cost of game development specifically for a Wii U version? If we use this formula, then a game like Blops 2 for Wii U made something like 5.2 million dollars in margin. That's all well and good, but what did it cost them to develop the game? 5.2 million dollars seems a bit high for a port. 2 million maybe? 2 and a half? I don't really know. Cost of making a Wii U version is estimated to be 1 million US dollars, that is basically a low budget port with foundation based on Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 version/build of the game rather than lets say Xbox One/PlayStation 4/PC version which would need a complete recode of the game to make it run on Wii U thus it would have higher costs then up-porting Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 version. Down porting from Xbox One/PlayStation 4/PC is currently unprofitable...

What I do know is that you're not including opportunity cost in this decision. Suppose Activision made 2 million on Ghosts for Wii U. That's nice, but what else could they have been doing with that team at the time? Could the team have been working on another project that would have netted 5 million? You have to take that into account too. This thread is not about that, it is only about the thing that this threads title is about.

supernihilist said:

wrong things.
Average game doesnt cost 20m dollar. Many considered AAA games cost that so........ You are not considering the cost of porting it to other platforms, alpha and beta testing, costs of advertisements and many other things...
and the 27$ the publisher gets is not profit but revenue... I did not wrote profit, but "profit"... It is revenue, but also profit after they recoup the costs of development, marketing and production of copies...

the WiiU ports were rumored to cost around 1.5m to do so its safe to assume WiiU ports are all being profitable...but how much? is it worth it? It is 1 million or 1.5 million... It all depends on complexity of the game... So there are variables/factors that affect the cost of porting it. You know that companies sometimes have teams that have nothing to do and they have teams of new comers that get tasks like this to practice and get experienced then shufled to some real projects... Porting is like bottom of the barrel, you need a place to start from and porting a game is just that for most coders/programmers.
thats the Q