| naznatips said: Oh and here's a fun link for you. Looks like retail developers get far less money per game sold than I originally thought. http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/2002futurecontentconf.shtml "Profits will increase as the industry transitions to electronic distribution, he added. Companies could earn $30 per copy, up from about $7.50 per physical box. " $7.50 per physical box. I would assume he's referencing PC games, which retail for $50 instead of $60, so we'll be nice and say developers of 360 and PS3 games get $10 of physical box price. And, given the fact the link is 6 years old, we can hope that maybe developers see a little more of that cut and raise it all the way to double his estimate: $15. That would mean 2 games totalling $40 million in development would need to sell 1.3 million copies apiece to break even. Even if we went with Dodece's lowest estimates of $15 million apiece for development the games are only 1/2 of the way to breaking even. Ouch. @dababus: Microsoft in no way owns Uematsu (they do own Sakaguchi). Uematsu is freelance. Hence the work he did on Super Smash Bros. Brawl. |
I think the person who wrote that article mixed up their numbers and the $7.50 is retail's take for the game because otherwise the number just don't make sense.
For example lets look at Activision's net revenue on the 360 from October 2007 - December 2007:
According to their filing they made $435 million net revenue for that quarter off the 360. If Activision only received $15 per game sold that would mean they sold 29 million copies of games on the 360 for that quarter alone which makes no sense. On the other hand using the numbers I provided brings the number down to ~8-9 million copies of games sold (along with downloadable content) which seems much more reasonable considering VGChartz list Activison's two big releases for that quarter (Call of Duty 4 and Guitar Hero 3) as selling around 6.1 million copies for that quarter.
