Everyone's talking about the sales and what's profitable, but I'd like to see an analysis of what's typically required (in man-hours) for a game like Rune Factory. For example, if it takes a team of 20 people (counting 10 programmers, 4 artists, 3 musicians, 2 play-testers, and 1 project lead) about 1 year to develop a game from scratch, then that's roughly 41,600 man-hours (40x52x20). If you figure an average pay rate of $30/hr, then that's around $1.25M for the total labor involved, but without distribution and manufacturing costs. I would think you'd be able to make most smaller niche Wii games for around $1.5M or so. If that's the case, then you'd only need 71,428 copies of the game sold (at a profit of $21 per unit) to break even. Thus, it seems plausible to me that their target was to sell over 75K units.
Hardware is only a means to enjoy great games!
