bigtakilla said:
Mine as well, and if I may say so and not get shunned by the Nintendo community for life, the most ambitious game anyone will have made for the console. The amount of talent (and therefore money) they have put into this game (inside and out of Nintendo) is above and beyond most games in general, let alone jrpgs. |
VERY rough caculation on the development cost of this game, and how many copies it has to sell to break even:
According to Wikipedia Monolith Soft have 123 people employed. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_Soft
Since their last Xenoblade Chronicles title in late 2010 they have not released any major game (Development co-operation for LoZ Wii + 3DS, AC New Leaf and Pikmin 3)
The salary for a Tokyo Software Engineer is around [¥5 000 000 = $41 500 ]according to what I get from a quick Google search. ( Please make this number more correct if you have better information, also this is not the total cost for the company!) EDIT! According to this http://www.develop-online.net/news/square-enix-dev-salaries-twice-as-high-as-sony/0112373 the salary is more like ¥14 000 000 = $116 500!
A devoloper/publisher like Nintendo/Monolith will get about half, $30, of the retail price. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html
This will all make my VERY simple calculation look like this:
123 software engineers for 4 years earning [$41500] $116 500 a year gets $30 for every copy of the game they sell.
[123 * 4 * 41500 / 30 = 680 600]
EDIT: 123 * 4 * 116 500 / 30 = 1 900 000
[They have to sell 700 000 copies to break even.]
EDIT: They have to sell 2 000 000 copies to break even.
Please improve on this calculation with better information!!
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