Nintendo Wii owners, it's time to acknowledge third party failures

[BMaker11]

Khuutra said:

BMaker11 said:
Ok, Mario Galaxy and Gears at $16 million. But those are first party games, meaning the money made at retail go straight to the publisher. These 3rd party games, however cheap crappy they may be, only get a fraction of the money from retail, because some of that money has to go to the system creator (Sony, M$, Ninty), so logically, they'd have to sell more copies in order to turn a profit for the developer

That's very sensible and I am glad that you said it, but let's go a bit slower here. You're getting ahead of me. Gears of War is a third-party game with an exclusivity contract, not first-party. Mario Galaxy is first-party, I know.

Let's look at Mario Galaxy - 16 million is pretty expensive for a Wii game, right? That probably took more than a million to reach profit, right?

The reason I make this comparison is that in most cases, publishers pay for the entirety of the development of a game, and then take all the money that proceeds from retail sales until such a time as profit has been made, after which the developer gets royalties. So it comes to the same thing in terms of how many games are needed to turn a profit. Right?

I didn't mean to turn this into two questions, and will keep it narrower from here on out.

If that were true, not a single development studio would fail if they all got paid anyway. Only publishers would go under, if they front the bill to games that don't sell well