Selling 1 million units is no longer enough

[johnsobas]

binary solo said:
Was a time too when making $100 million at the box office meant massive success and huge profits for the movie studio/producers. Now-a-days with movies often having a production budget over $100 million they need to make at least $200 million at the box office to break even. Of course movies have DVD/blu-ray sales to help profits.

It's called inflation.

DLC can help, but it's also where sequels come in. Money may be lost on the first game because of the huge resource that is required to build a game from scratch. But the sequel will borrow a lot from the first game (and improve on it too) development-wise and make it easier for the sequel to make the overall franchise profitable. If you can squeeze a 3rd million selling game into a generation then the profits will really start to roll in for the developer and producer.

Also, like Crytek, licencing the development kit helps. Crytek makes money without having to make an acutal game, the developer's production costs are less because they don't need to make a game engine from scratch.

There's no getting away from the huge profitability of a well loved franchise with relatively low production costs. I bet NSMB Wii became profitable after its first 250K games were sold. Now that's success. I bet MW2 also became profitable within hours of it being released, probably needing less than 1 million sales to get past break even.

There's a place for good quality, low budget games (just like good quality low budget movies), but there's also a place for good quality big budget games. There are PSN/XBL/Wiiware games that sell for less than $10 which will turn a profit, and they are fun and provide good value for money. But I also want the Uncharted 2s, and Final Fantasys, and Mass Effects, and , and.

MW2 may have been profitable after the first day of release but it took a lot more sales than 1 million.  They had a 150 million dollar marketing budget for that game not even including development.