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letsdance on 29 March 2010
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Viper1 said:
Mr Puggsly said:
Gojimaster said:
i bet these kind of stories are very common on hd systems, and we don't hear about half of them-- that is crazy a game can sell 1.5 mill and make a profit

I think these stories are common on the Wii as well. That would explain why developers often ignore the Wii for quality releases.

To my knowledge only 1 developer has lost money on Wii to the point it required them to shut down.  There are several such cases on the HD side of things.

Average break even point for a Wii title is ~300k units.  Average break even point for an HD title is over 1 million units. 

Don't forget that publishers typically fund the development from the start.  A lot of these studios that went under started the projects with their own money and then pitched them to publishers and failed to generate enough revenue to recoup their initial development costs.  Ninja Theory is alsow one of those developers who began the project prior to the publisher (Sony) getting involved.

letsdance said:
jarrod said:

Eh, more than twice as many people worked on MGS4, and it was in development twice as long... pretty sure it's budget likely dwarfed Heavenly Sword's.


I doubt it. I think Kojima went the more traditional way in developing the MGS4. Ninjatheory was very ambitious in their developing with facial mocap and voicing famous people.

 MGS4 had a much higher production budget than Heavenly Sword.   The voice talent angle you are pushing is irrelevant.  

The problem here is that Ninja Theory started the project prior to signing the contract with Sony so Sony didn't front the development money (as it works with most projects).  The game didn't sell like they had hoped so Ninja Theory didn't recover their costs.   Voice talent is such a small portion of the total budget that it's silly to point to it as the blame for profit failure.


It is a really small portion of the budget. Obviously some people like yourself can't comprehend plain english. I didn't know "A few million" out of 30 - 40 million was a big portion... my bad.