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twesterm on 22 July 2007
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Chubear said:
twesterm said:
What do you mean need to sell each week?

A console needs to sell enough to continue to have support from a user, other than, there isn't a set amount it needs to sell. It really doesn't matter if a console is in first, second, or third as long as people buy games for it.

A game doesn't need to sell a set amount each week, it just needs to sell a certain total in order to start making money. For a PC game I believe (it's been a good 1-1 1/2 years since I looked at the numbers) the number is in the area of 600,000 games and around 800,000-1,000,000 for a console game with exceptions on both sides of course. For instance, RE4:Wii doesn't need to sell near the 800-1,000k mark to be successful (make money) while Killzone 2 will have to sell a lot more than the 800-1,000k in order to be successful.

No no, you're a little off on the numbers. Last gen, for a "highly development budgeted" game the "magic" number was usually 250,000 as a standard. Of course many games didn't really need to reach the 250,000 mark as their production cost were as high. There were some games last gen that only really needed 50,000 to recoup development costs.

For this gen, "highly development budgeted" games are said to double last gen's #s (500,000) to recoup on costs and start making significant returns. I have no clue with PC games but I think the 600,000 you stated is very very high and 1 million units for consoles is definatly way too high. However, for a game like KZ2 800,000 would sound right but that is not at all the norm.


 I don't remember the exact numbers, but I know for a decent quality polished console game for last gen, they were at least 800,000.  I posted how much it takes to make a game at that quality and it ranges from $6 (no marketing) to $11 million (uber marketing).  In order for those to make money at somewhere between $5-10 made per game (I'm thinking 8 or 9, but I'm pretty sure it's at least in that range), they're going to have to sell somewhere in the range of 800k-1000k games in order to make money.  A last gen console game that sold 250,000 copies total failed.  A PC game might be able to squeek by with those numbers, but console games cost more.