Squilliam on 10 January 2009
| jammy2211 said: A break down of where someones $49.99 / $59.99 purchase of a retail game goes and how much retail, publisher, developer, production costs go to. A better idea of how much games cost to develope would be useful too. |
- 25% (aka $15) goes to pay the art and design guys.
- 20% ($12) goes to pay the programmers and the engineers.
- 20% (also $12) goes to your friendly neighborhood retailer. EB / GameStop, whoever.
- 11.5% ($7) goes to a "Console Owner Fee" - ie. whichever one of the Big Boys made your hardware (Sony, MS, Nintendo.)
- 7% ($4) goes to marketing, and puts Mad World and Marcus Fenix on MTV.
- 5% ($3) goes to "market development" -- paying for cardboard Standees of the Gears Crew and elbowing other games out of the way for shelf space at your local retailer.
- 5% ($3) goes to actually manufacturing and packaging the disc.
- 5% ($3) is spent paying the Man for IP licenses or maybe hiring some big name voice actors. If your game isn't an original IP, here's where you get dinged by Marvel, Disney, or Ray Liotta's agent.
- 1.5% (just $1) goes into the publisher's pocket.
- 1.5% (also $1) goes into the distributor's pocket.
- 0.3% (about 20 cents) goes into corporate costs. Management, overhead, lawyers, etc.
- 0.05% (less than 3 cents) go into the cost of paying for the Developer's Hardware. Who knew an SDKs can cost tens of thousands of dollars?
And there you go. $60 of Gears, a la carte. http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3156044
My question is what is the actual break even point for games when you account for overall company overhead? 1M doesn't seem to be cutting it...
Tease.
