ZombiU Was "Not Even Close" to Profitable, No Plans for a Sequel

[Slimebeast]

Barozi said:

Slimebeast said:

It's easy to say in hindsight that the game wouldn't become a success.

But at the time everybody thought it would sell fairly well. 1-1.5 million was probably a reasonable target lifetime (some copies at discount) and upside was +2 million.

Probably it cost $20 million. All AAA games cost at least $20 million. That requires 1 million copies at full price to break even.

Well it would need to sell about 700k at full price if the budget was $20m. Though that doesn't include advertising costs and as far as I remember it had TV spots.

Well that also depends on how you do the accounting. Fixed costs versus variable costs etc.

Generally speaking, I don't think it's fair to separate all games from their publisher and count all the revenue towards the core development budget when we know that publishers, especially big publishers like Ubisoft, have huge costs on the publisher side of the company, not just costs of their development teams. All the infrastructure, legal stuff, administration, insurance, trademark management & patents, head-hunting, executive salaries and big office buildings must be paid too. The whole organization must be paid for. And their revenue comes only from games.

A game at full price gives roughly $30 to the publisher. I don't think it's fair to assume that just because those $30 covers the core development costs of a certain game, the game broke even. Technically and in publisher accounting it might be registered as breaking even (although I doubt it), but in the eyes of the publisher if every single Dollar from game sales goes towards the development team I doubt they regard that game as breaking even. To the publisher such a game lost them money.