Crytek nearly launched Crysis 3 on WiiU but it had to die

[Mnementh]

zarx said:

Mnementh said:

And looking at general gaming-sales: Every budget that needs more than 1 million units to break even is stupid and the risk of losses is extremely high. Most AAA-games should break even on some 100K units. Porting-costs are usually much more smaller (i pointed out the reasons in the previous paragraph). Some 10K sounds reasonable for a port of a AAA-game with some effort put into making it a good port.

Are you kidding? A game that would break even at 100k units is be very definition not AAA, a $3-4 total budget game is relegated to downloadable/indie games and shovelware. Hell in todays market a 1 million unit break even point would be a B teir game  in the eyes of the major publishers. Your average AAA game has a production budget of $20-50 million plus marketing which is usally about as much as the production budget so break even for most AAA games is somewhere between ~1-3m units at full price with some of the bigger games such as CoD, GTA etc needing 4-8m units to break even on their $50-100 million development budgets and even bigger marketing budgets.

Well, 300K-700K I assume at full retail price for a game like Crysis. If it needs millions to break even, we would never had seen a sequel (because companies don't want to barely break even, they want to make profit). 10% for a port, more for a GOOD gamepad-integration. Most AAA-games should be in the area of some 100K (=multiple times 100K). Only a few probably can calculate with millions sold units at full price for breaking even, COD is one of these rare examples. Although I assume Activision also happily calculates with less and cashes in on the franchise.