Are 500k sales a success on Wii?

[shakarak]

famousringo said:

shakarak said:
I would say so. i worry though about a game like conduit.

High voltage has about 120 employees. They created the quantrum 3 engine, and this game that we know of has been in development for about a year and a half. The only other games I'm aware they have been working on are those three wiiware games (ign previewed the Animales game back in June). So you can tell that i'd say 75% of the workforce works on the conduit. If that game does not make 1 million worldwide it's obvious that it wont turn a profit. ALso consider they are not publishing it themselves and that a portion will go to sega.

Does anyone know what the average pay of a senior engineer, game designer, artist, sound engineer and so forth are? Just take that into consideration and It's going to be tough for the conduit to make bank.

 

Your 75% estimate is really high. Last I saw, High Voltage said that 30 people were currently working on The Conduit. Here's a list of published and announced games they've developed for Wii alone:

Animales de la Muerte
Ben 10: Protector of Earth
Dora the Explorer: Dora Saves the Snow Princess
Evasive Space
Go, Diego, Go! Great Dinosaur Rescue
Go, Diego, Go! Safari Rescue
Gyrostarr
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law
High Voltage Hot Rod Show
The Conduit
V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack

I'm sure they have a quite a few people working on their Quantum engine who aren't strictly working on The Conduit project, but I'm also willing to bet that they're still working on some unannounced licensed games. They might even have some projects in the works for other platforms, though they seem pretty committed to Wii development at this point.

The point is that those 120 people churn out quite a few games, so I wouldn't assume that the majority of the studio is working on The Conduit at this point. And I don't agree that 1 million is going to be Conduit's break-even point.

Well maybe 75% was a little high.  But what do you think would be there break-even point?