Has profit from GT5:P covered the development costs of GT5?

[shams]

bobobologna said:

shams said:
Probably about half. GT Mobile is sort of lumped in there, and its all about funding the entire Polyphony company. They also have other back sales.

Licensing all of the cars, and doing things like recording accurate sounds for the cars won't be an easy (or cheap) thing to do.

GT5 is likely to have an overall development & marketing budget approaching 80m-100m. So even if GT Prologue covered 25% of this - its a good return.

(since its Sony published, they are likely to make a few extra $ from each software unit sold as well)

 

I remember reading that a couple car companies give Polyphony free licenses to use their cars because the game is so popular.  I'm not sure what the situation is now, especially if Polyphony wants to incorporate car damage, but considering how big and popular the GT series is, I'm sure more than a few companies would jump at the chance to have their cars in GT5.

This would go both ways. The "less popular" (or fancy?) cars see this as an opportunity for free marketing, and potential sales.

The "more popular" cars sell themselves - and its more of a benefit to GT to have them included than the other way around. So they would be demanding license fees.

In general, the "more content" in a product like this - the less keen companies are to put their products in it. Its because it "dilutes the value of their content". So for instance, a company like Ferrari might be more keen to give a company an exclusive license to create a "Ferrari branded" game - than to add Ferrari vehicles to GT (where they become a few out of a thousand).

Since GT5 will/does have strong online elements, Sony can always add cars later - so I guess they could focus on license free cars for now.