| LordTheNightKnight said: It used to be that a million seller was the magic number, like making $300 million at the domestic box office is now. It's not required for smaller films, but its awesome of a film makes that much. It's only with HD games that a million is required in general instead of just for the big budget games. So applying that standard to Wii games is ignorant at best, flat out slander/libel at worst (as in deliberately lying to hurt the Wii's reputation, which may be the very point of this disinformation). |
On top of this few publishers expect to profit off of most of the games they release, and there are many titles that have been released with remarkably low expectations (and potentially the expectation of taking a loss on it) because publishers believe (or at least they used to believe) that if you give a good studio resources to make games they will eventually have a hit that recovers all of the money invested in them. The arithmetic for this is pretty simple because if a game requires 250,000 copies sold to break even and the game sells 200,000 copies it produces a “deficit” of 50,000 copies; and if they released a game with a similar deficit every year for a decade this would work up to a 500,000 unit deficit. Eventually, if the studio does get its big hit, this studio could produce a title that sold 2 Million more than its development cost, and could get a couple of sequels out at these sales, and the profit from this one series easily covers the cost and opportunity cost of their earlier titles.
