| MickKaine said: Hi, I'm a newb. Just for future reference, what's generally good sales for a week? What's a success? What's a failure? How much should a game have been selling if it's been released for a month and what should the average game have sold in a month? |
All of this depends on expectations, really. Hardware is a more difficult beast to gauge -- HW will continue to sell for years and can gain or lose ground accordingly. Software, on the other hand, usually makes or breaks itself within its first month of sale. That's not to say that a game won't continue to sell beyond that, or that there aren't exceptions, but typically you can see if a game is going to ultimately be a success or not after the first four weeks of sales.
Defining a success is, to me, is a game that makes a profit for a company. A small Xbox LIVE or PSN game that sells 100,000 copies is a fantastic success. A huge big, budget game that sells 100,000 copies is a major flop. On average, 500,000 copies sold for a game would probably be a success, but again... for a big budget game, 500,000 copies would be leaking money like a sieve.
The Shenmue series reportedly had a budget of $70 million US, Heavenly Sword reportedly had a budget of $20 million US with $10 million more for advertising, Stranglehold cost $30 million US to develop, and Halo 3 cost $30 million US with another estimated $10 million in advertising.
Shenmue was a fairly popular game and its sales would have been considered a success if it had the budget of a typical last-generation game. As it was, it was a black hole of money and is now an unfinished trilogy.
Heavenly Sword -- without even including the advertising budget -- would need to sell well over a million copies to break even. It has not sold even close to that and will likely never recoup its losses.
Stranglehold has sold almost 50% more than Heavenly Sword (and is set to release on PS3, too), but would need to sell a million copies more than it already has to break even. That's just not a realistic outcome. The cost of the title may end up having a severe impact on Midway's ability to make games.
Halo 3, on the other hand, shows a big-budget game can make a profit -- it only needed to sell around 2 million copies to break even. It's already more than doubled that. However, how many games have the sort of hype that Halo does? It's an anomaly and most high-budget games will never even sniff this sort of return.
I think that many future titles will find their previously exorbitant development budgets firmly leashed as sales from previous titles become apparent. No one wants to lose money, and even an amazing game that sells fairly well can be a significant failure if their budget is out of hand.
