In an interview, Bryan Walker, a former producer at EA, claims that a game with a $100 million budget would need to sell "about 6 million" units simply to break even, and that even high end mobile games now cost in this ballpark. ("9 figures", or $100m and over)

Bear in mind also that many AAA titles are also far more expensive than this: Cyberpunk 2077 reportedly cost over $440 million, Sony's Spiderman 2 had a budget of over $300 million, while 2020's Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War cost $700 million.

The reason you are seeing so many studio closures these days is because for a $100 million dollar budget you need to sell 6 million units to break even!! Absolutely crazy!

This is why you are seeing so many games going multi-platform.

Bryan Walker was a producer at EA,… pic.twitter.com/OO0tMW9gHt

— Reece “Kiwi Talkz” Reilly (@kiwitalkz) November 24, 2025

Don't spend a $100 million then, simples.

Some napkin math tells me thats probably not correct. 6 million x $70(Average price of a new game on release)= $420 000 000. Even accounting for a $100m marketing budget thats still leaves say $220m. Let's go further and minus the usual 30% fee most platforms take which would be $126m. That still leaves $94m. Where does that go? Not to mention some might have Deluxe editions, some might have mtx.

First party needs to sell less though, paying that 30% to yourself...

His evaluation comes to avg $16.66 profit per copy.

It literally depends on:

1. Digital ratio and retailer/storefront cut.

2. Average price.

3. Whether a game is 1st or 3rd party.

4. Cartridge or disc cost.

5. Publisher/developer split.

6. Marketing budget.

A prime example is GT7 and Assetto Corsa selling comparable numbers on paper, with GT7 being 1st party and averaging at almost 20 times the price. It's just such a silly thing to act like there is one rule applying to everything.

You'd think it'd be that easy, but the big publishers apparently think otherwise.

There are devs that take this approach though, most notably Nintendo, but also a number of third parties have managed to keep budget creep under control; this year's Clair Obscur, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, and Cronos: The New Dawn all had modest budgets compared to AAA fare.

The math doesn't make sense, unless they are already factoring over 50% of those copies will be sold for bargain bin prices ( <30 USD)

I'm 99,9% sure this is just another "soft PR" to make gamers feel pressured to keep spending as much money as possible in games because we need to feel "sorry" for those poor millionaire publishers :/

Cutting the 30% platform fee would bring the number to about 4.6 million, though my math could be off as it was never my strong suit.

The term "profit" would imply all costs related with gaming development, marketing and publishing were already subtracted. He's assuming the studio only earns 17 USD per copy sold, which is very hard to believe its true for games priced 70 USD

He's giving more of a ballpark/typical example than a hard definitive rule I think.