I was wondering about whether LOTR: war in the north made a profit or not, and it got me thinking. How much does a game actually need to sell to make a profit? its wierd because there are some games that hardly sell anything and still get sequels... So, anyone have any ideas?

What Kowenicki said there's a lot of variables.

Obviously it's based on various factors. Previous to the 7th generation, a million was a good benchmark. Except for very high budget games, it was generally assumed that a game which sold at least a million copies was successful. With higher development costs in recent years, the situation has become more tenuous.

okay, so what cost:profit/loss ratio would their be for games such as skyrim (e.g. 1:2.5) or lotr:war in the north (e.g. 1:0.85)

It depends entirely on how much money the game cost to make. If you're more interested in finding out the specifics, you can search and find some estimates. I'm not sure how much a game like LotR WitN costs to make, but I will say that I had an extremely fun time playing through it twice with my friends online. =D

it's very hard to say, you see games like LA Noire selling more than 4 million and yet the studio is gutted and it's unlikely that there'll ever be a sequel, but then you have Atelier Rorona (one of my favorite examples) selling 80,000 in Japan and getting a sequel and happy developers.

So you'll have to figure out an idea of what LotR might have cost to make to have a clue, or just wait to see if it gets a sequel from the same studio.  You can get a reasonable idea if you can figure out how many people actively worked on it or atleast how many people are on the studio and then how long the game took to make.

For a low budget DS game, it can be as little as 50,000 copies. For one of the biggest blockbusters, anything short of 5 million is too little.

War in the North looks fairly low budget for a HD game but the studio making it, Snowblind is relatively large at +80 members. So lets say 80 developers making it for 2-2.5 years. which gives roughly a $16-20 million dev cost. Add another $3-4 million for marketing and a few more millions for the LOTR license/royalties (these cost!) and on top of that a significant number of millions that the publisher Warner needs from each game to run its gaming division.

So all in all the game would need minimum $30 million from sales (yes a very rough estimate and I'm almost pulling these numbers from my ass) to cover all those costs, and since you get $25 per copy sold (low reviewed games like War in the North end up quite quickly in the bargain bin) it would need to sell at least 1.2 million copies to break even.

Now, how many copies has it actually sold so far? A million?

NO... just no.

that would be a bigger budget than Uncharted games have, and a much bigger budget than the Gears game (1st one especially).

having games in the $20 million budget range is well above average. thats a big budget game.

it is more that like LotR had a budget well below $10 million after marketing, etc.

why is my reply to slimebeast not showing up? :( i cant be bothered typing it again...