XSEED talks about sales and new titles

[theRepublic]

moondeep said:
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.

Apparently, a decent estimate of a games development cost can be found by the following formula:

(# of people working on game) × (# of years in development) × $100,000 = development cost

You may think that $100,000 seems high, but it is not just for salary.  It just seems to match up well with the little bits of info that we've seen over time.

Like I said above, Xseed is only the publisher for America.  They did not develop the game or publish the game in Japan or Europe.  That means those costs associated with the other regions don't apply to them.  The development costs are probably split somehow with the other two publishers (Marvelous and Rising Star).  That is probably why Xseed said that these sales are 'OK'.  They probably covered their own costs or made some small profit.

Another thing to remember is that only about 20% of games on the market are profitable.  The other 80% only break even or lose money.