How much do publishers get / game?

[auroragb]

HappySqurriel said: The "cost" of development is (roughly) $100,000 per developer-year, plus the costs of licenced technology (and in the future the licenced game assets) ... Gears of War only cost $10 Million to make because it was (roughly) an 8 hour game with a reasonably focused multiplayer component ... They could have (easily) spent $20 or $30 Million to produce a moderately long (16-24 hours) single player campaign with the multiplayer options that were available in the previous generation.

Good point. GoW is a moderately short game. Tho I doubt a linear increase in playtime is a linear increase in budget. Of course there would be a non-trivial incremental cost for additional content. But there is great deal of overhead in initial development / design. I'd suspect that each additional 8 hour would be at most half the initial cost... I'm just saying that GoW costs probably more than most games and probably similar to typical AAA titles and higher than average titles. So, I'm just suspecting that the 500k breakeven number is bogus. As for Starbreeze, looks like it's a movie adaptation house. I'd imagine that the movie studio take a very large share. Hence, most film games suck. Tho I suspect 10% is still a bit low.