| Ghutto said: Z&W = 400k BB = 400k It's good to me... |
I think a lot of people are under the impression that a game has to sell a million copies for a pubAllisher to see it as a success ... To a certain extent there is a truth to this when you're talking about big budget high profile games; and depending on the game their expectations (or sales needed to break even) could be much higher than 1 million.
Although a game like The Legend of Zelda can take a team of 40 to 60 people working 18 to 30 months to develop on the Wii (as an estimate $6 to $15 Million budget) a lot of smaller projects that are developed may be handled by a 10 to 20 person development team that is working for 12 to 18 months (as an estimate $1 to $3 Million budget). These smaller projects will often break even off of sales in the 150,000 range, and if they make it to 500,000 units they are amazingly profitable; if you assume $20 per title makes its way to the publisher/developer sales in the 150,000 range translates to $3 Million.
Edit: On a side note, I know of a ("Casual" game) developer who is hiring like crazy because they're moving away from the PC towards WiiWare/XBox Live Arcade/PSN ... There teams are between 9 and 12 people, and they typically finish a game after 6 to 9 months; even with the small ammount of money they will collect per copy of a game they sell (I would guess in the $5 range) they expect to be amazingly profitable for the next couple of years.
