This might be an obvious question. But I was asking this myself, when thinking about launch titles. When games are sold to retail, does this mean the money is in for the publisher, developer, etc. Or is it final when the consumer buys it. I ask this because of titles like Resistance or Red Steel. Particularly Ubisoft has a lot of launch titles for the Wii. While Red Steel and Rayman may sell decent, the sales for Far Cry and GT Pro are nothing to write home about. While Red Steel may sell over 500k worldwide (it could already be past that), I imagine over 1m have been sold to retail. This seems to be even more the case for titles like GT Pro. Sales may be 75k WW, but to retail it could be over 500k. So if selling too retail is the last thing a publisher has to do, it is far more lucrative to bring out a lot of launch titles for a system. Retail fills the shelve space anyway...

Well yes and no. I mean if a company brings out a bunch of launch titles, they want to bring out titles that will sell for the retailer. If the retailer buys a bunch of a companies titles and they sell poorly, the retailer has to take a loss to clear those titles from their inventory. That may affect how many titles the retailer buys from that company in the future.