Procrastinato said:
First... retailers don't buy Wii games at $40 from the publisher, especially if they sell for $40 (or less) at retail. From the money they do get, there are licensing fees, etc... Your 250K number is pretty outrageous. From SaviorX's own post (which you quoted, but snipped...): "Game development on the seventh generation consoles typically requires a budget of around $10 million or more and according to IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon. "You might be able to weather one title coming in at 500,000 in sales," he said. "But two or three failures like that and even big publishers are going to be hurting." Looks like 500K is a loser, from the quoted professional's standpoint, on a $10M dollar game. Re-evaluate your guesstimations around that. |
500k is a figure you've quoted from an analyst and if you've been on this site any great length of time you'd know how much disdain we hold for them here. I'll cede the point that $40 per game for a self developed/selfpublished game is a bit high but the laughably weak American dollar the past 4 or 5 years has meant that it isnt all that much lower as a worldwide average.
Mathtime: I've worked at gamestation for the past 2 years and from order forms and general management stuff i know we buy Wii games from the publisher at £25 per unit and sell them for £34.99-£39.99. The weak dollar (at the moment $1.66 to the pound) means we pay $41.50 per game. On a self published/self developed game which is what i take the quote from Ubisoft to mean you could expect them to take a total of 75-80% rest goes to hardware licenses and various other licenses required. That woud mean from the UK's biggest specialty retailer they take (using the lower figure of 75%) $31.12 per unit. I'm assuming now that other shops/supermarkets have the same deal with publishers as the lowest i've seen a new game has been £26 for MW2 from the major supermarkets in an effort to draw in people.
Eurozone i'm a little more fuzzy on but even if we say 25 euro per game that retailers pay, at the current exchange rate ($1.55 to the euro) it won't be all that much lower at $29.06 take after conversions and licenses.
Back to the analyst quote you do seem to suffer from selective reading disorder as you can clearly see (I hope) that it is $10mil or more and then gives an arbitrary number without anything linking it to a figure of total publishing costs ie. dev costs+ads+discs+cases+printing which is what I have done in my example of a $10mil dollar game.
Tyson, Mecha Birdo and Dracula down. Starting to become as crazy as Leoj used to be
