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

[Slimebeast]

osamanobama said:

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.

War in the North certainly looks like a $10 million game but it is hard facts that Snowblind is a big studio with +80 members who worked on only this game for over 2 years (there just was a rumor who said layoffs were up to 80 people from Snowblind studios after they finished War in the North, so it sure must be a big studio). Also I didn't say total budget for it was $30 million. The budget in the traditional sense is more like $19-24 million, including marketing. (the $30 mill reflects total revenue that the game needs to truly break even. Warner needs money to keep publishing games and that LOTR license cost a huge amount of money to aquire).

Now to your Uncharted and Gears argument. First of all one has to realize that gaming is an unfair business. You can have a quality studio with huge talent like Naughty Dog and Epic who are able to make super hit games for average costs. The thing is that not all publishers have this luxury. For every Naughty Dog theres at least three studios like Snowblind, Realtime Worlds (Crackdown) and Ninja Theory (Enslaved) - big 100-member studios who are allowed to make $20 million budget games that get mediocre reviews and that seldom make any profit (it's all these games who explain why most publishers hardly make any profit).

Naughty Dog with Uncharted and Epic with Gears are huge exceptions.