Kirby is "Not" A Flop... Update: Rainbow Curse Showing "Balls" :)

[Faxanadu]

Tachikoma said:

KLAMarine said:

Samus Aran said:

Except it wasn't made by a small team. There were around 80 people working on this game (not including localisation teams or people listed under special thanks).

That's more people than the development teams of the 3 Prime games.

So how much did it cost to pay these 80 people?

Development time - 27 months

Minimum staff salary (Before tax) 250,000y/month
Total staff salary per/month (80 staff) 20,000,000y
20,000,000y x 27 = 540,000,000
540m y at current exchange rate : $4,445,386.10

So the payment for the staffs salary alone would be, at minimum, 4.4 million usd.

That's assuming they were all in minimum-for-position jobs, and does not include localization team salary, does not include testers salary, and does not (obviously) include the higher position salarys, QA, PR, etc.

Even if you go with tbone's hopes of it hitting 300k lifetime, in selling 300k, they would need to be making $14.81 on every copy sold just to cover the absolute-minimum salary costs for the team that made it.

Not even breaking even with a lifetime estimate makes a game a flop, and I genuinely doubt Kirby RC will achieve that goal of breaking even.

And yet i'm the one told to "do some research", right, unfortunately i deal with realities not hopes and dreams.

Right. And all 80 employees worked from day one till the last day on the project. Sure.