High Voltage: Preposterous to demand games sell a million

My two cents: I will also add that there is the hypocracy about complaining that some Wii games were "obviously cheap", yet also "flops" if they don't sell more than a couple hundred thousand. If they are really cheap as some claim, than selling even that little will make a profit.

And some user here insisted that selling half a million copies of TvC was basically a disaster. How much could that game have cost, even on the Wii?

Good to hear Eric state what most of us already knew to be true.

Too many people assume that they can make a general bottomline line for sales that games have to sell, but obviously the truth is far more variable.  Big budget games may require a million sales or more but that doesn't mean that every game requires it.  There are games that sell as little as 80,000 and still get a sequel so obviously not every game needs to be a million seller. 

In truth it's very difficult to tell whether or not a game met it's sales expectations because we don't know enough about development costs and how the money from each sale is divided amongst the retailers, publishers, and developers.  All we can do is wait for the company to make an official statement one way or another.

Did MadWorld cost a lot? I don't think so. Despite that, it has sold more than 600k.

This also relates to the lack of budget disclosure. Movie budgets are usually public, so it's easy to see such things. Video game companies seem to want to make games like movies, save for being more public about how games are made and for how much.

Reggie: Wii Games Must Sell a Million to Make a Profit

That’s a lot of copies, how many have made the cut?

Unfortunately, not that many. In fact, most games typically sell less than 150,000 copies according to a New York Times article, where Nintendo of America’s head honcho Reggie Fils-Aime shared this interesting information. Fils-Aime said “[one million titles] was a lower threshold than for the other consoles,” and to make that number possible “[Nintendo] deliberately did not add high-definition capability to the Wii so games would be cheaper to make.”

According to NPD figures, only 16 titles have sold more than a million copies, and that’s from a list of nearly 500 titles. Of those 16, nine of them are first party, and if you follow the Nintendo Wii even slightly close, you can probably guess the majority of them - Wii Fit, Wii Play, Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros Brawl, etc. The grand king of Wii games is Wii Sports which has sold more than 40 million copies to date worldwide, making it the best selling video game of all time (although it's worth noting that it's a pack-in title in every terriorty outside of Japan).

Wii games sell new for typically $50 USD or less, while PS3 and Xbox360 games are in the neighborhood of $60 USD or less.

source: http://wii.nintendolife.com/news/2009/03/reggie_wii_games_must_sell_a_million_to_make_a_profit

i only posted that ^^ to cite where this magical million number first came from as far as i can tell.

obviously it's not true but the same goes for ps360 games as well.  honestly this number only exists for fanboys of any of the consoles to mock fanboys of any other console.

The source article doesn't give a direct quote from Reggie about that, and I believe I saw this before, and Reggie later corrected what he meant, which is closer to what the guy in the OP meant.

EDIT: Saw your reply just now. Should add though that the soure article from the New York Times admits HD game budgets are about $25 million, before marketing costs. So it does show that even if not a million, games on those systems need to come close.

My guess is that these smaller companies like platnum and high voltage finance their own games and get them done with any means necessary, as cheaply as possible. They are fine examples that you don't have to spend gazillion dollars on production to make a fun game. Then when theya re done they deliver them to publishers (Sega in both cases).

Sega then takes the game and pays for the printing/packaging, distribution and console licensing. For a game like Conduit, I doubt either side spent more than 15 million combined. So you have 15 million dollars invested with the game being made, packaged, distributed, advertised and sitting on the shelf.

Assuming that the game is sold for 35-40 dollars to retailers, it would be quite easy for them to get their money back if they sell 500,000 copies or so to retailers.

Im really curious what the revenue split would be for publisher/developer situation like Sega - Platnum/High Voltage. 50/50?

i do remember him having a correction statement but honestly that's kind of beside the point. there were dozens of articles sensationalizing this news which is what people are going to remember.  the correction was made but i doubt even 5% of the articles posted the correction.