Has the "million seller" status lost its significance?

[kumagawa]

Shadow1980 said:
It's true that in generations past if a game sold a million copies it was a huge milestone. During the 20th century, only a small handful of games sold over 5 million copies. In fact, SMB3's 18 million copies was utterly mind-boggling for a game that wasn't originally bundled. If you compare it to the size of the market back in 1990, it was proportionally speaking perhaps the most popular game ever. And most games had six-figure budgets well into the 90s, with the biggest expense by far being the cost to manufacture the cartridges (though unlike dev costs, manufacturing costs are included in the price). With budgets that low, it's hard to see how any halfway popular game was wildly profitable, and games like SMB3, SMB2, and Zelda I & II are perhaps among the most profitable console games ever relative to budget size.

While budgets have gotten very big over the years, for the average game, a million copies should be more than sufficient for it to be profitable. Assuming every copy is sold at full price, you're talking about $60 million in revenue, while the average game budget is estimated to be around $20-30 million. Assuming video games follow the standard Hollywood rule where a film needs to make at least twice its budget to be considered "profitable," then a million should suffice for most titles. I have no idea if that same rule actually applies to games or not, though, so don't quote me on that. Of course, the bigger the game's budget, the more it needs to sell. A game that costs $100 million to make would need to sell 3.33 to 5 times as many copies as a more average-budgeted game in order to be profitable.

Even in the current era where games cost eight-figure sums to make, so long as they are budgeted properly, there's no reason why they can't get away with selling one or two million copies, which is a milestone even many niche titles can reach nowadays. If you get situations like when Tomb Raider or Resident Evil 6 sold several million copies in their first couple of months and still were regarded as disappointments sales-wise, then someone did something wrong at some point. BioShock Infinite had comparable sales to Tomb Raider, yet 2K thought that was pretty good. If the average game can sell several million copies and not be considered profitable, the the publisher has no one to blame but themselves. One should never spend more than you can possibly hope to make back. You take a big risk and it doesn't pay off, too bad. Should have thought about that before you blew all that money on a game that had no chance of selling 8 million copies in any time frame.

 "Assuming video games follow the standard Hollywood rule where a film needs to make at least twice its budget to be considered "profitable," then a million should suffice for most titles."

 

In regards to Hollywood films that's "breakeven" not profit.