Flop or not...

[Bodhesatva]

Munkeh111 said:
@ daleklord, it can't be 1m for all PS3 games, only the big ones (Uncharted, R and C, HS) the dev of Dynasty Warriors Gundam said that the game had to sell 500,000 to break even which it didn't so had to be ported to 360

 Or how about something like Everyday Shooter? It was developed by one person. That's a PS3 exclusive.

This isn't set in stone, and there are multiple factors which dictate flop-itude. The main three are:

1) Developer/publisher expectations
2) Marketing budget
3) Development cost

A game with low development cost, little marketing, and small developer expectations could exist on any system (although yes, it's considerably more likely on the Wii than the 360/PS3), and unless we know all three factors, it's very difficult to know what is what. For example, what if Nintendo released Wii Sports 2? We could safely assume the development costs will be low, and I doubt NIntendo would market the game heavily, as they seem to rely on viral marketing to take care of that for them with such games.

So, should we assume the game has low expectations? Absoultely not; we don't know for sure that Nintendo would have high sales expectations for such a game, but we can strongly assume they would, and as such 500k copies would be a flop.

It's just... hard to balance all these factors for any individual game. Only rarely do we have all the information.