if publishers can't make decent profit with pre-order bonuses, multiple paid DLC, Limited/Collectors Editions, Online passes and a good percentage of sales being digital that can't be sold (20% I remember was stated for PSN, 35% on some 3ds/vita games), ports and sequels that probably use a lot of assets from previous iterations which can lower the budget of their sequels, then it's better off they close down.
Level 5 stated that if Ni no Kuni(a new original open world IP which uses Studio Gibhli animation) manages to sell over a million that they would consider making a sequel. On the other hand a game like dead space 3 which has assets, engine , character models/animations, sound effects from 2 previous games that can (are) be used needs 5 million sales for EA to consider making a sequel.
An open world game like The Witcher 2 which has great graphics/story/gameplay(subjective) on pc sold well enough for Project Red to make a sequel on next gen consoles/PC (Or even Witcher 1 which was only on PC) .A semi linear game like Tomb raider failed to meet expectations with over 3 million sold in first month or so.
Companies like Namco Bandai have been making profit year after year, yet a lot of their games release japan only and have sales range from 100K to 2-3 million. i remember reading an article about Falcom that said they haven't made a loss on games in over 10 years(look it up)
Capcom was very pleased with Dragon Dogma sales even though it's only 2million+. They re-released the game again with the expansion and it sold well again.
The only problem I see is that big publishers realized games can make them billions of dollars (GTA, COD, Skyrim , 1st party games), so they stopped caring about B-tier level games and started spending ridiculous budgets on Marketing their games to chase the money.
And frankly not allowing used game sales is just sad and idiotic. Both Sony and Nintendo have stated that their digital sales are increasing a lot(20%-30% on some games). With more time and putting incentives on digital counterparts of games(free dlc, cheaper initial price,play as you download, earlier release digital) these percentages will rise naturally without garbage policies.
