How much does a game need to sell to make a profit?

[osamanobama]

Slimebeast said:

War in the North looks fairly low budget for a HD game but the studio making it, Snowblind is relatively large at +80 members. So lets say 80 developers making it for 2-2.5 years. which gives roughly a $16-20 million dev cost. Add another $3-4 million for marketing and a few more millions for the LOTR license/royalties (these cost!) and on top of that a significant number of millions that the publisher Warner needs from each game to run its gaming division.

So all in all the game would need minimum $30 million from sales (yes a very rough estimate and I'm almost pulling these numbers from my ass) to cover all those costs, and since you get $25 per copy sold (low reviewed games like War in the North end up quite quickly in the bargain bin) it would need to sell at least 1.2 million copies to break even.

Now, how many copies has it actually sold so far? A million?

NO... just no.

that would be a bigger budget than Uncharted games have, and a much bigger budget than the Gears game (1st one especially).

having games in the $20 million budget range is well above average. thats a big budget game.

it is more that like LotR had a budget well below $10 million after marketing, etc.