| Squilliam said: The realities of a really big game published/developed by the same company are staggering, in a positive way on HD consoles compared to the Wii and compared to lesser selling HD games. 1. Retailers actually pay more for a game in higher demand, it wouldn't surprise me if they paid $50 or even $52 for each title. Remember most of the copies will be gone the first day for a highly anticipated release. Its easy money for a lot of retailers and very efficient. 2. Console royalties? I would be surprised if it didn't average out to be $5 or less for this title. Not only do the royalty rates go down the more copies shipped, they also go down for highly anticipated titles. 3. Shipping? When you're shipping a two boxes with 60 copies each to a retail store, how much does that come to per title? 4. Advertising? Microsoft and Sony will add their own advertising to the mix. Its also averaged over the massive retail sales. 5. Packaging/Market development? Retailers will give them the best shelves and packaging costs are cheap since hundreds of millions of game/dvd cases are made every year. 6. Special editions? Extra money! So in all I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pull in an average of $45 in the hand after all charges, taking into account the LTD edition sales with marketing costs applied against the total number of games shipped rather than per individual title.
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Yeah right. Impossible. That all sounds nice and all with your numbered 1-6 list, but how do you explain that the publishers have so low profits?
I have heard no one even try to explain this. People are just fantasizing numbers here.
SQnix can be easily compared to Take Two, who has GTA4 as their mega game, selling +10 million. The same principle should be there - if FF can get $45 then GTA should be too. But we all know Take Two has been losing money for years. Not even the GTA release quarters are profitable - despite people claiming publishers rake in $40-45 per copy from the first shipment.
SquareEnix has low profit margins as well.
