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Hynad on 23 July 2015
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Teeqoz said:
Hynad said:


That's not really how it works. Publishers get a % of the sales. But you also have to factor in the fact that handheld games don't even come close to costing the same as AAA console games to develop. Which means they have to actually sell more copies of their console game to break even compared to handheld titles.


Hynad, the ratio between 80% of 60 and 80% of 40 is exactly the same as the ratio between 60 and 40. 3 to 2. lol.

 

There is a huge difference between the development costs of say, FF XV, and that of DQ XI. The increase in development costs doesn't inherently come from developping on a home console, but frol better graphics, which you'd expect on a home console. Now, I doubt DQ XI is gonna be a graphical beast, but it'll have rather good production values. However, it'll probably not surpass 50 million (and that's highballing it, GTA V cost 110 million, and that was decelopped for PS3, 360, PS4, XBO, and PC, and has a massive open world.), versus a low 15 million on the 3DS (low estimate). the difference between the lowest for 3DS and the highest for PS4 is still "only" 35 million, and more realisticly, the difference is 15 million. Which isn't that much. So if we say DQ XI PS4 cost 35 million to make, and the publisher gets an 80% cut of the 60$, so 48$ per copy, they'd have to sell 730k copies to breakeven, While for the handheld, with 15 million, and 80% of 40, 32$, they'd have to sell 460k copies to break even. But for each copy sold after the breakeven point, they'll make more money on one PS4 copy sold than one 3DS copy sold.

 

If we say the 3DS one would've sold 4.5 million (the DS DQ sold 5.7 million), that would be 4.1 million copies sold after our hypothetical breakeven point, so 4.1 mill x 32$= 131 million profit. 

If the PS4 game sold 3 mill (I think that's rather conservative actually) that would be 2.3 million sold after the hypethetical breakeven point, so 2.3 mill x 48$= 110 million profit. Now sure, they're sacrificing 20 million shirt term, but add to that the other things I said (They wanna increase PS4 jap userbase, they want to make a home console game, they want DQ to grow in the west) then it's obvious it isn't just because of bias.


Your first sentence was out of place. I didn't put this into question. So I will question what your problem is.

Devs will break even faster with handheld games because they cost much less to produce. At 15 million for a 3DS game, you're inflating what it costs to produce most of them by quite a big margin. If a game like Witcher 2 (two) cost 12.5M to develop and was cutting edge on PC when it came out, surely you don't believe a 3DS game will cost nearly as much today. DS games would typically cost between 500K and 2M to produce (look it up) . It is very doubtful 3DS games would now cost around 15M to make... Also, back then, they usually needed to sell only 100k DS game copies to break even. 

Simply put, developers don't get a 80% cut. During the 7th gen, for example, they'd typically get around 15$ per unit sold.

As for the rest that you typed, games on consoles go down in price quite fast (unless they're Nintendo first party games), meaning the cut to the devs don't go higher as time goes by, but lower.