| spurgeonryan said: I made a thread about this a while back. Actually a few threads. Handheld games do not need much in sales to actually make a profit. Then for Wii games I think it is only a little more. For some reason I want to think he is way off on a lot of games. That being said. Triple A games should sell well. If they do not then there is a problem. 1.5 million in sales is what in this day and age of DLC? 100 million dollars? Something sounds off. I just cannot figure out what it is because I am not an analyzer or anything even close. |
I can help you with some numbers as a friend that works in the industry provided me with some...
The average DS game required around 2-3 million dollars to be developed, of the price of the game around 15 goes to the developer, so it would require to sell something between 135.000 and 200.000 worlwide to be profitable, but the AAA DS games require more money, sometimes twice as much, so it would require doble the sales to be profitable.
For Wii the situation is similar, the average game requires between 5-6 millions to be developed, but since the games are higher priced it requires between 250.000 and 300.000 to make money back, that is why tittles like No More Heroes and The Conduit got sequels. The AAA titles can cost has much as 15 millions to produce, and will require around 750.000 units to be profitables, that is the reason many third party were not willing to risk a AAA tittle in the console as the early sales did not support the financial investment.
The number for Xbox 360 and PS3 are even bigger, the average game can cost around 11-14 millions and around 10% to 20% extra to make it multiplataform, but they also get a little bit more from the final price of the games (they sold them at 60 for a reason), around 25 dollars per unit. So a regular multiplataform game can recover the investment with around 480.000 - 670.000 units in both consoles. But AAA tittles for the console can cost any amount of money, there are no concrete numbers but there have been mentioned budgets of 20, 30 and even 60 million dollars. If we say the average is around 30 millions plus 15% for multiplat, we need around1.380.000 in sales to recover the investment.
That is how he reached that number, and that is why this generation the publishers are playing safe, betting only on know names and franchises and releasing sequels every year. The jump in the next generation is a dangerous one as the budgets can be doubled to reach a higher graphic quality, and that is also one of the reasons that some publishers are very interested in the Wii U right now, because it offers them a new plataform to put their games with only a 20% increase in their costs.
