Citing Lackluster Sales, Dishonored Franchise Is Being Shelved

[mjk45]

pokoko said:

zorg1000 said:

I think he means that if a game isn't profitable at 2.5 million than it has too big of a budget.

But on the other hand, this doesn't say the game didn't make a profit, just that sales were lackluster and down significantly from the first. It's entirely possible that the game was profitable, just not nearly as much as they hoped for.

He might have meant that but his example didn't put anything in perspective at all.  For one, a third-party game is always going to have more overhead than a first-party game.  More importantly, no one is in business to "match production costs".  I often come across posts where people act like breaking even is a success.  It's not.  In business, breaking even is essentially the same as a loss.  Even a moderate profit can be viewed as a loss in the big picture.  

I don't think it so much about budget more to do with expectation of growth you see it all the time in business where a company makes a healthy return on investment but it's stock drops because of higher  expectations, I remember Square-Enix talking about a disappointing Tomb Raider even though it had sold if my memory is correct  around 5m in its first 3 months, because they had set their sales expectation to over 6m even though previous Tomb Raider games averaged around 2-3m level . 

Still they will look at the budget and say can we invest this time and money somewhere else for a better return and you can't really blame them with a game that sold less.

About the game itself the first one I enjoyed to a point the point being for a game that supposedly gave you choice it pushed you toward  the stealth option by punishing you if you mixed it up.So that put me off playing dishonoured 2