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Dgc1808 on 06 January 2014
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superhippy420 said:
DarkFury said:

5 Million target sounds very much the reality, I'm afraid.

The THQ bankruptcy papers give us a glimpse on the cost of AAA development and how many copies games need to be profitable. This is some of the best info I've ever seen on what it costs to make games nowadays:

http://www.consulgamer.com/platforming/thqs-recovery-sales-targets-and-development-budget-timing/787/attachment/thq-sales-targets/

So the total cost of making some AAA games (including marketing, corporate overhead etc. I am sure):

Saint's Row 4: 123 Million
Homefront 2: c. 100 Million
Darksiders 2: c. 80 million

and so on... (fascinating read, btw) So if the SC:BL had a typical AAA budget, 4-5 million sales are indeed required to put the game in black. :(

This also shows how most of these games have not been profitable, btw -check their sales against these targets.

I don't worry about Ubi Toronto though: Ontario government has supported Ubisoft with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, so I don't think Ubi can easily pull the plug on that that Studio.

The cost of game development is the main reason why I think Sony will be in big trouble in the coming years, unless their 1st party games start to sell much better.   A game like SM3DW sells 1.5 million (90 million in revenue) and I wouldnt be shocked if Nintendo is already making a profit on it or has atleast broken even.  A game like Killzone Shadow Fall sells 1.2 million (72 million in revenue) and it may not even be halfway to breaking even, considering how much more it must cost to develop a game with the specs that it has.  Hopefully Sony's 1st party sales really pick up because for as much as we all talk about console sales, they don't really mean anything in terms of the parent company's success.   The gamecube only sold 20 million consoles but Nintendo sold 72 million 1st party games and actually made more money off it then Sony did off the PS3.

i'm not too worried about SONY in this department. There development teams have become very collaborative and games as high in production as Uncharted 2 were made on $20M. Their big 2 as far as we know were Killzone2 at about $40M (3.5-4 years in development and with a large work force) and Gran Turismo 5 at around 70M (~6 years of dev time on a large workforce). Killzone2 more than likely covered it's expenses easily and Gran Turismo definitely did fine considering how well just the demo sold. It really comes down to marketting and corperate expenses.

In the past they also had the habit of selling their hardware at a loss inittially. PS2 loses were in the $100-$50 range for some time and PS3 loses started at over $200. PS3 also got $100 price cuts in it's first 2 years and SONY had to continusly trim and cut on hardware to keep up with this. Game budgets seem to be fine considering most of their studies release more frequently and aren't as big as Polyphony.



4 ≈ One