So, Final Fantasy 13 will have cost $100+ million to make?

[invetedlotus123]

Squilliam said:

Slimebeast said:

Squilliam said:

Easy: Its not the games you hear about which kill a publisher, its the games you don't. Whether they sell poorly, don't show up on peoples radar or are cancelled before release. EA Had R+D of 1.3B last year, purely software development costs for example. You can't look at the games which people like to point out as profitable, you have to look at the big picture.

Good argument, if it was true.

Look at the quarterly reports, they dont have the kind of huge variation they should if all of a sudden a 1st month 5 million selling game for $45 per copy was included. It should be reflected not just as a big revenue increase but mainly as a gigantic quarterly profit spike, but it isn't.

How many first month, 5M selling games have there been? Also relative to the total revenue even 5M sales are actually quite small when you have multiple million selling games coming out at the same time. In the case of Halo 3 there was a very obvious spike in revenue for Microsoft for example, but even then next to a division which has over 7B in revenue per year its pretty small in comparison.

@SaviorX: Im not saying that HD games are a walk in the park, im saying that the blockbuster games which sell quickly make a LOT of money for the publisher. Whether it makes up for the other costs they have is another thing entirely.

Well, this is why I think S-E wants so hard to enter in the MMORPG world, they can't release a KH, FF or DQ every year and just can't have losses normal years and have huge numbers when they release their main franchises. With MMORPG like FFIX and the Final Fantasy XIV they'll have some millions guaranteed every year, look at what WoW made to Blizzard, i sure i don't expect FFXIV to be like Wow, but sure it can reach 2 million active accounts in the apice.