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

[Khuutra]

BMaker11 said:

Khuutra said:

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

That's not true: if developers don't make games that sell well, nobody will publish their games, so they go bankrupt because they don't have a source of income.

Now.

Mario Galaxy probably took more than a million to reach profit, right? At least a smidgen!