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bigtakilla on 25 December 2014
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baloofarsan said:
bigtakilla said:
PixelPerfect said:
Still my most hyped Wii U game of 2015, even more than Zelda U.

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 ¥5000000 = $41500 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!)

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 a year gets $30 for every copy of the game they sell.

123 * 4 * 41500 / 30 = 680 600

They have to sell 700 000 copies to break even.

 

Please improve on this calculation with better information!!

How much does it cost to hire Suzuki Yasushi, Hideyuki Matsumoto, Hiroyuki Sawano, Kazama Raita, Yoko Tsukamoto, Ogi Takashi, Fumihiro Katakai, as well as help from on entire corporation for 3D modeling background work by the Kusunagi corperation.

So the exact amount I couldn't tell you, but bringing in veteran outside resources, you always have to pay more than internal resources. Guess we'll just have to wait and see if they ever release that information. But if you can get that you'll know the exact amount.