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BengaBenga on 29 December 2008
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RPG said:
BengaBenga said:
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.

 

MGS4 must have given Konami a very tidy profit then. GT5 is most definitely the most expensive first party game, dont even need numbers when I know PD is huge and the game has been in production for years. Sony cater to every whim and need of PD as well most probably, cant blame them after what they have done. I doubt Killzone 2 will ever make a profit but that game seems to be a "look at what the PS3 can do" game and simply establishes Guerrilla as a major first party.

Home is what I am most interested in, any estimations on how much that cost to make?

I'm sure Konami is happy with MGS4 results, however the income for the game compared to previous titles has probably decreased a lot.

I think GT5 will be the most expensive game we'll see this gen, but it will also likely earn a lot of money. It's not the big franchises that are a big risk. GT5 will easily sell 5 million units, resulting in at least $150 million revenue for Sony. It's the smaller/new series that have to sell around a million to break even that are huge financial risks. Stranglehold almost killed a big publisher.

MGS4 has sold over 3.5 million copies so far, so profit is probably already around 25 million $, a 50% return, not very tidy in most business books.........

I think for game develoeprs that's not an enormous amount of ROI, especially not considering it's Konami's biggest franchise. Again, it's a good result, but you have to take into acount that a game like MGS should cover for the risk of developing new franchises and engines etc.

Yup breaking even is not good.  In busieness to make money not break even and a below 20pct return on profit is not entirely bad but not good either since the profit are use to reinvest in back into the company.

Or paying the shareholders...which is the #1 goal for a company.