Reggie says most Wii games can make a profit with under a million sold.

[Reddeadguy]

WereKitten said:

MaxwellGT2000 said:

That point is rather moot since the same is true for all consoles, and if that mattered then no one would have bought Guitar Hero 5 on the Wii but the Wii version is still the highest selling sku.

As for royalties I haven't seen jack as proof for how much anyone pays or gets away with not paying, so I'd like to see some kind of facts around it before people go around claiming how much you can and cannot make off each game sold.

And if everyone expected their games to do so well, then no wonder everyone is screwing themselves, cause you simply can't expect people to buy that much so often.

If most Wii games would profit more if sold at $60, I'd think that publishers would have moved to that value, though.

The rough numbers for the publishers' share on the retail price I took from older threads, an interesting post giving an estimate was this one from shams (who I happen to understand is somewhat in the business).

PS: According to those rough estimates I should have better used $18.5 instead of $17.5 for a $50 game and $23 instead of $22 for a $60 game, but it wouldn't have tilted the result of the estimation as the difference stays constant. And the $1 difference is probably irrelevant given the error margin... the point is there's about $4-5 more for the publisher out of the $10 retail price difference.

 

Where did you get your estimate that there's only $4-5 for a publisher for every $10? Doesn't the retailer generally take in roughly 15-20% of a game for a 59.99 product? That drops the game to 45-49 level. Then the publishers take their royalty fees on top of that. And then shipping/packaged material costs. I'd say the publisher is getting near $35-$42 per $59.99 product and that doesn't take into account the special editions that are major profit margin winners. Sure, the price drops over time, but I think you are on the low end for a major title like MW2 and GTA V in terms of the price point. And what you also forget is that Sony and Microsoft often lend millions to help advertise games like MW2 and GTA V. Those costs are not all taken by the publisher