| Mystro-Sama said: Uhhh wat? Research was conducted last gen and the average development cost for a game was $23m with certain higher budget games going into $60m. So to break even for an average HD game you would have to sell $383k copies. What happened with Tomb Raider was a rare occurance of SE being poor with budget management. |
First off you are wrong, primarily because different types of games require different kinda work/devs and costs; but secondly lets even look at it as if you were right.
Higher bidget games eg. FF15 say cost SQEX $60M to make. And we are not even looking at a marketing budget, just the development costs for say 3-4yrs of development. To break even they would have to sell 2M copies. This is because from every $60 sale, publishers/devs get only around $30. the rest goes to royalties, retailers and packaging/distribution costs. So i really don't know who or where cam up with that research numbers for you.
Now the average salary for game developers is currently at $80k. If you are looking at a development team that is as large as say 200 people, then that puts the annual development manpower costs at an average of $16M/yr and this isn't adding overhead costs like dev kits and research funding. I could go on, but there are just so many factors your numbers doesn't account for.
