| Gazz said: MS has the same development costs as any company so don't forget to add that money. I also wonder how money MS made or lost on this game and how much their worldwide mediablitz had cost. Retail, taxes, shipping takes it toll on every product so if MS really made a dime on this is debatable. I read somewhere that the entire worldwide media campaign alone has cost them 50-75 million, but can't seem to find the link for that one so quickly. Seems plausible since Halo 3 ads are on all the time in every country on every station. |
Yes, MS has the developmental costs. But unlike a second or third party game they publish, they keep ALL the profits. There is no splitting the revenue between publisher and developer. It's all theirs. And they made ~$300m the first week.
Subtract distribution and retail markup, I'll be EXTREMELY generous and subtract $100m (retail markup on games is usually 20% or less and distribution can't even be half that). Add import taxes (which couldn't possibly be higher than 10% overall) and we're down to $170m. Add in manufacturing costs (again, generous at $5/copy overall) and that comes to roughly $20m. So now we're down to $150m. Add in your marketing costs ($75m) and we're down to $75m. Shipping costs are negligible when we're dealing with these kind of numbers but I'll give you $5m.
The actual developmental costs of the game couldn't be $70m. Correct me if I'm wrong but no game has ever breached $50m in development.
Unless I'm forgetting something huge, MS has made money on H3 already using extremely conservative numbers in my estimates.
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