Flop or not...

[albionus]

Bodhesatva said:

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.  

I'd say the bolded section should be factor number 4.  Something like past performance of the same or similar franchise when considering the first 3 factors.  One reason Wii sports 2 should be assumed to sell millions is Wii Sports did.  I'd say RRR2 is a flop even though it had the same budget, hype, and marketing as the first (very little) but it is selling poorly relative to the first game, though probably not relative to the first three factors alone.