To all of those that think SEGA's both hardcore games bombed.

[SaviorX]

WereKitten said:
I don't know about its development costs, but weren't once some sort-of-official statements for MadWorld, talking of a $4M marketing effort? Even assuming quite low development costs ($4-5M) that would mean $8-9M+ to cover.

At $25 per sold copy going to the publisher, that's 320-360k sales needed at full price, more like 400-500k over the life of the game since it was dropped to $30 at retail pretty early (I think it had less than 150k sales, hard to say with the adjustments).
Thus why should we think it's turning a profit yet, at 220K copies sold in total?

Correct me if I'm wrong about the marketing cost numbers, though.

I've heard from Capcom that usual advertising for a game is close to %10 of its overall budget. I also heard that they spent $2m advertising Zack and Wiki in Japan, but to no avail. They spent a little above the norm to help that game out. I doubt that MW's advertising would be half the overall cost, assuming it cost $8m to make,which is a little too high. $1m in each territory (NA/EU) sounds about right. However, that is Sega money, not Platinum. It cost $3m to advertise during the 2009 Super Bowl, because there were 90m viewers available. So $1m for every 30m people available sounds like a normal advertising budget on TV. However, networks obviously don't get that high a number every day, so the cost could be divided by a substantial amount. I'm just throwing it out there, but it could be like $25,000 per network, if that.