Selling 1 million units is no longer enough

[MaxwellGT2000]

Kasz216 said:

Aprisaiden said:

Kasz216 said:

Aprisaiden said:
Selling 500k+ for most games is still considered a success, as the game should break-even or return some profitability. This article is mainly referring to high budget titles and the big issue with them is the way they are given excessive marketing budgets, development budgets AND are expected to generate enough profit to make up for the lower budget titles that failed to turn profitable.

The answer to this problem is to learn how to reduce the cost of high budget titles and for the industry to actively teach various consumers that they should be buying the high quality AAA budget titles for there consoles and not "casual mini-game collection 8,567: this time we got 40% on meta-critic"

Except.... 10-20 million keeps getting quoted this generation as an AVERAGE.

The 10-20 million figure is for higher budget titles and for titles using new engine's, many titles however are built using the same engine for well under that cost (an example is that all of Insomnaic's games have used the 1 core engine with a few modifcations made for ratchet/resistance).

 

 Also we don't know how the 10-20 million figure is calulated, is it development only? does it include marketing costs? How much do publishers get per game sold $15? $20?, are big buget titles like GTA4($100 million for dev+marketing) / MW2($200million? dev+marketing) included? are budget titles made for under $1-$5 million included?

No.  The 10-20 million is for an average title... we have a LOT of evidence pointing to this.  What you consider "Call of Juraz" a high budget game?  Really?

Example

"The Epic VP indicated that the average game project budgets for the PlayStation 2/Xbox game generation was $2 to 6 million, whereas the average budget for next-gen gaming can be $8 to 20 million. Noting that the average team size for the PS3/Xbox 360 generation is 60 to 80 people, he claimed that a combination of outsourcing and engine licensing enabled companies such as Epic to run at a much lower full-time employee base and cost."

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10971

Example 2

To put things in perspective, the article gives the example of Namco, who, in 1982, made Pac-Man for nearly $100,000 (today, it would be about double that amount, due to inflation). According to BBC News, the average PS3 game costs nearly $15 million to make -- and that's before any marketing is done for the game

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/29/cost-of-next-gen-game-production-is-a-burden-on-developers/

 

EA has also stated the average HD game is 20 million and said for them to break even they need to sell around 1.1 million, they've also stated that Wii budgets were 1/4th of the HD budgets on average so about 5 million which is in line with last gen as Factor 5 stated, the guys that know all too well how high budgets are for this gen.