| NJ5 said: I think you are missing something. The profit from making a PS3 game is the profit from shipping all the copies to retailers, minus development costs, minus marketing costs. Of course Activision (and every developer) makes profit from shipping a copy of a game, as the disc, box and manual cost next to nothing... but the real costs are in developing the games, not making and shipping the Blu-Ray disc and the instruction manual. The question is whether the added profit from all the copies is greater than the development and marketing costs, and how much greater. That's what determines the profitability of making PS3 games for Activision.
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Is this still true for a megahit multiplatform game (think CoD/MW2 level)?
Let's say they spend something like $60M on a PC/PS3/360 game. I'm not even sure how will they file the developing costs. Will it be something like $40M for "main" version on PC, $8M for 360 version, $12M for PS3 version, or will they split it equally in $20M slices?
Anyway, sell something like 4M PS3 copies, the fixed development costs will average to $3-5 per copy. I suppose that's less than what will be paid in royalties to Sony and physical support... that's something that may bug Activision: the more you sell, the more you want the variable costs to weight less, as I suppose that the old optimization idea of attacking the costs depending on their relative amount holds.
