A biased review: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

[zorg1000]

Samus Aran said:

zorg1000 said:
I'm looking forward to getting this game, the stages in 3D World were great and I enjoyed the demo. I kinda wish they gave it the Luigi U treatment tho, what I mean by that is offer it as $20 DLC for 3D World or $30 for the retail version.

Let's assume a couple of things:

A developer costs a company around $10.000 per month (not just paycheck, but also health insurance, transport costs, software licensing, computer equipment, development kits, etc.)

A video game company gets around $30 for every $60 retail game that is sold. Captain Toad is $40 which means Nintendo gets around $20 per retail copy sold (probably even less because the manufactering and transport costs remain the same for a $40 game compared to a $60 game). They get the full $40 if you buy it on the eshop. Captain Toad had a development cycle of one year. Although they were working on the next Super Mario game simultaneously. 75 people were listed in the credits of Captain Toad.  

75 * 10.000 * 12 = $9.000.000 

Captain Toad had a development budget of $9 million. 

This would mean Captain Toad would need to sell 450.000 retail copies to break even. It's impossible to know how many people will buy the game digitally. If everyone bought it digitally they'd only need to sell 225.000 copies. Captain Toad thus needs to sell in between 225.000-450.000 copies to break even.

Currently the game sold 150.000 retail copies according to vgchartz (with only one day of sales data in the US and it hasn't launched yet in Europe). 

Keep in mind that most of the money goes to the publisher and developers also have to pay royalties to whichever company that owns the platform they're releasing the game on. Luckily for Nintendo, both those things don't matter for them. 

Sources used: 

http://yachtclubgames.com/2014/08/sales-one-month/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html

I think I'm going to buy Shovel Knight just because they provided me with that interesting blog. Now give me an 8-bit Mario, Link or Samus in the game! You did it for Kratos... ;p (I know it was Sony who gave them this courtesy). 

Lol I'm not sure how my post warranted such a rant If the budget and sales expectations called for a $40 price tag, that's fine. I'm just saying for me personally, $40 is a bit more than I would like to pay for this game, $30 would be ideal and based on RolStoppables review saying it was a bit low on content for being $40, it seems he agrees as well.