Heavenly Sword sold about 1.5m but devs didn't break even

[Viper1]

Mr Puggsly said:

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.

That's because HD consoles tend to games of a higher caliber. The typical HD game is much higher quality than the typical Wii game.

Its not hard to believe the average Wii game only need to sell 300K, because the average Wii game is low budget or shovelware. I'm sure games like Dead Space Extraction, CoD, Dead Rising, No More Heroes, Conduit, and Resident Evil need to sell more than 300K.

Not by as much as you're thinking it would but yes, they do require a little higher sales.

Dead Rising, No More Heroes, the CoD's, The Conduit and the RE games made profit according to their publishers.   I think DS: Extraction is the only one that's still working toward it.

Development time, staff volume and other factors are what determine production costs.  Even the bigger Wii titles do not requie the same number of programmers, artists, etc...or the same volume of development time as the average HD title does.

For example, the Wii title with the largest development budget is Super Mario Galaxy which is believed to be $15-20 million but some reports believe that includes the marketing budget too.   Yet the average HD game has a development budget of $10-15 million without marketing.