Lafiel on 14 August 2014
| ToxicJosh said: I think the issue is that publishers aren't content with minor successes. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html Using this (getting old) breakdown. $27 out of a $60 game goes to the publisher. http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649 And Kotaku has a relatively current look at the cost to make a game. Watch Dogs cost $65 million and for no good reason I'll use that as a baseline. (OK, the reason is that it was a big AAA release and is a reasonable upper limit for probably 95% of console retail titles). $65 mil/ $27 = 2.41 million sales In other words, for a game to be profitable in it's own right, <2.5 million sales will generally be needed. That is, for a game to recoup it's costs, plus some more. Publishers don't want 'plus some more'. They want each game to be a blockbuster, which just isn't feasible. As the platform holders want to rope consumers onto their exclusive platform in order to sell their subscriptions, they are happy to provide some real profit margins to the publishers to encourage consumers to pick their subscription plan over their competitor. |
the "development budget exceeds 50million €", meaning the advertising budget isn't included in that
but advertising is extremely expensive (and gets more expensive each year), especially for a game like Watch Dogs, so I wouldn't be surprised if advertising the game was more expensive than developing it
and ofcourse they want a return of investment that justifies the huge risks they take by pumping all that money into the project - otherwise they could just take that money and invest it into some stable stocks/funds to have a good 4-8% roi each year while risking very little
