Rougly how many sales are needed to break even on a high budget game?

[Godot]

rhisc said:

Seneque said:

rhisc said:

Long time lurker on the site but I'll add this interview with the maker of Crackdown.

David Jones: I think it's also just being realistic. It's easy for some people to underestimate what it really takes these days to produce a great game. It's certainly true of the retail market in online as well.

So we're very resolute, we know what it takes, we know how much it costs, and we don't kid ourselves that it's going to take anything less.

Just sticking to that principle, not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, both internally within the company and with investors, saying yes, it is a lot of money, but truly that's what it takes.

Unfortunately these days it does take that amount. Crackdown wasn't that long ago and our development budget was something like USD 20 million*, and even that to me now, I don't know if I could do anything for much less than that.

You've got the Call of Dutys, GTA IV – some challenging stuff to try and beat out there, or at least set a bar equal to that.

 

Thanks, that's useful.

It would be interesting to have a thread where we could store this kind of information when we get them. The 'How many copies are needed to be sold for a game to break even' is a pretty frequent asked question. To have these quotes and links regrouped somewhere would be practical.

 

Here is another interesting story from Forbes that shows the breakdown of where your $60 dollars goes.  Basically 20% or $12 goes to the retailer and 11.5% or $7 goes to the console owner (ie Sony, MS, Nintendo).  The rest appear to be estimates.

Here is an interesting quote from the story:

For the companies that do put next-generation titles out early, making a profit is tough. Namco Bandai president Takeo Takasu said his company needs to sell at least 500,000 copies of each PlayStation 3 game it creates to make a profit. Analysts predict that some other publishers will need to clear 1 million units to get in the black--and start making about $1 per game sold.

If that figures for the cost breakdown of a game is accurate, we could calculate the numbers of copies they need to sell for each game to break even for those we know the development cost (those that were stated in this thread).