Halo 3 sales reach $300 million in first week

[Dodece]

Few games exceed thirty million dollars in development costs. Those game that do are usually MMORPGs which as anyone who has played them are extensive affairs. With massive amounts of coding, and artistic assets. Those games have to seem fresh for months even years. Further more they have to be sufficiently complex to keep the player engaged for that long as well. Halo 3 is also not a game that is going to push any technical envelopes. Nor will you find an obscene amount of animation which is increasing the size of many PS3 games justifying things like twenty five million dollar budgets. I would expect that Halo 3 cost Microsoft around twenty million dollars to develop.

Further more your woefully over estimating the marketing budget of the game. While you might think its everywhere. The marketing was very likely directed, and further more much of what you say was cross promotional. Do not use the cost of advertising during the Super Bowl as your metric. Commercial time can be purchased at a very reasonable price. Infomercials are a testament to that. Frugal directed marketing done correctly can produce a lot of volume. I expect at most Microsoft spent twenty million dollars on marketing.

So you might have a total expenditure of fifty million dollars, and frankly I think that is somewhat high. Many analysts have stated the Microsoft could be generating upwards of ninety percent profit on this title. Even if that is before advertising, and you believe the total is upwards of fifty million dollars. Microsoft just turned a eight five percent profit.

Yes Microsoft did very well for itself, and the majority of those sales your seeing are pure profit. Another game on par with this, and Microsoft will wipe out that red ring credit with room to spare. Obviously I expect this game to continue selling for a few more months. Then again it might be selling for years to come as well.