BengaBenga on 29 December 2008
We know that GTA4 was 100 million and Lost Planet little over 20 million to make. Those are afaik the only two specific numbers we have for this gen.
MGS4 is estimated around 50 million, Killzone is rumoured to be 65 million. This is likely including advertising.
On average 20-30 dollars of a game go to the publisher, but for first party games there are no licensing fees, so this is $8 per sold game higher for PS3 for Sony published titles.
So GTA4's break even point was 3.3-4 million units, Lost Planet 700k-1 million. Be aware that break even is a bad result for a company, I think a return on investment of 20% is the lower end of success.
