| HappySqurriel said: Questions about profitability are always very difficult to answer ... Killzone 2 was not an inexpensive game to make, and before the game was delayed (by over 18 months IIRC) it was reported that it was the most expensive entertainment project in the Netherlands history; and at that time I thought it was reported at having a budget of (something like) $40 Million. What this means is that (if you assume $25 revenue per copy sold) it would take 1.5 to 2.5 Million copies sold to break even on the development costs. Now, this is where it becomes far more difficult to determine profitibility. Two games can have drastically different marketing costs which depend on how heavily marketed it is, as well as how targeted the marketing is. Getting TV spots on a late-night re-run of Star-Trek on an unpopular cable network can cost 1% of the cost of getting the same spot played on a prime-time broadcast on a major network. As you can probably imagine, a company could easily run through $100 Million marketing budget in weeks based on prime-time television, while they could run spots for months for quarter the cost on small networks durring off hours. With that said, if you assume that they spent 25% to 50% of their development budget on marketing it would push the break even point to 1.9 to 3.8 million copies sold.
Basically, it is possible that it turned a modest profit or still lost a significant ammount of money. |
yea. now thats perspective.
