| BengaBenga said: My estimate is a $65 million budget. I've explained that before and don't feel like looking that up right now, but I think it's pretty close. Sony receives some $40 per sold game (first party: no license fee). My estimate for the break even point is somewhere below 2 million units, which it will most likely sell. |
Are you sure about that $40 figure, I thought only $20 went to the publisher in general, but that could be for M$ with a $10 licence fee, whereas I believe Sony has a $5 one (someone here said so), so I would guesstimate about $30 for Sony per game (which means that Uncharted made a $40 profit as it sold 2m unbundled copies at least... which sounds too high)
As for the budget, the last estimtes put it at $40m. However, squilliam has provided a reasonable way of discovering how much it costs to produce a game, taking $100,000 per employee per year. GG have a staff of roughly 140, and they have certainly been working on this fully for 2 1/2 years since Liberation, with some other people working for more than that, so I will just take years, which would lead to a cost of $42m. Again using Uncharted, they had to create a new engine, as well as help other devs, they took 2 years in fully development, and had had a small team working for a further year before that, and that game cost $20m, using a staff slightly larger than 1/2 of GGs, which makes the figure for KZ 2 look a little low, but you have to incorporate motion capture, and more extensive use of acting, and the fact that ND had to completely recreate the way they code games, and GG have had help making their game, so I think a $45m budget sounds reasonable
However, I don't think either of those figures includes marketing, and there is a good chance of a $15m advertsing campaign as they have announced that they are spending £2m in the UK, which is about $3m, the UK is about 1/10 of the PS3's install base, but it will have a higher ad budget than elsewhere in Europe due to the dominance of FPSs and the Xbox, and of course that 10% is out of a total including Japan where there will be far lower budget. So $15m is probably on the low side, and there is a good chance of it being far higher, maybe up to $25m
So, I estimate the total budget at $60-70m. With each copy giving Sony roughly $30 (maybe slightly more in Europe), they need to sell 2-2.3m copies. They have already sold 1.1m copies in Europe (they have sold them, retail has not), so I don't think that by my calculations KZ 2 will make a profit. However, there are other factors, such as variable exchange rates that makes it even more complicated to work out, and the budget is filled with guesswork, so I could be widly off
