10 / 70, kinda wide off the mark. He makes it sound like 1/100

My example was just that...an example.  Unless you know the total years of development and average number of people that worked on it annually, you can't make any assumptions.  And as I said, it doesn't take into account things like fees for major script doctors, engine license fees, music licenses, studio overhead costs, etc....  And finally, many production 'budgets' also include the marketing budget.  

Um, that's a counterargument, not a "to be fair" argument. That phrase means giving criticism, and then giving something positive or extenuating in response. That seems like nitpicking, but I just get annoyed at that phrase thrown all over the place when it doesn't fit.

And about the only games I remember explicityly claiming needing to sell loads were from developers themselves saying a game needed to sell a lot.

Though I have claimed there are some games that can sell a million and not make money, and perhaps I misunderstood how common it is, but that doesn't mean making loads of games cost that much is a good idea.

We don't know the full context of the comment. He was discussing the Wii, for one thing, so he might have meant that number, or he might have meant all releases in a year.

Plus with the total game releases, even 70 million sellers a year can be less than 1% of the games made a year.

Who didn't know this, especially for Wii/DS/PSP games?

"Calling such a believe "preposterous""

Way to work the spell check there Destructoid!!

When I talked to High Voltage at PAX I asked if he was dissapointed that Conduit got so close but  didn't reach 500k. He said that Conduit made more then enough profit and that it didn't need to sell a million copies to be successful. He talked awhile about how even if Conduit 2 sold fewer copies then Conduit did it would probably still turn them a healthy profit.

Besides look at High Voltages past liscensed titles, they didn't do much better then Conduit. I think to see their own creation selling almost as well if not better then their liscensed titles is really worth the effort.

The arbitrary "1 million sales" figure has mostly been promoted by people when they were trying to argue that a game for a HD console that sold a million copies but bankrupted the developer was successful while a game for the Wii that only sold 500,000 copies but received a sequel and was the most successful game for that developer ever was a failure.

Many publishers and developers (EA for example) effectively claimed that HD console games cost 2 to 4 times as much to develop as similar Wii games; and by similar they don't necessarily mean just that the genre is similar, but the scope and size of the project is similar as well. For many moderately big budget games on the HD consoles 1 Million sales (across all platforms including the PC) would only represent a small fraction of their development costs, and for many moderately small budget games on the Wii 1 million sales would represent several times their development costs.

Unfortunately, your math is quite a bit off.  Average cost per employee wouldn't be anywhere near $75,000.  Even if the average salary is that, which seems awfully low for average salary, the fully loaded cost per employee is going be at least double that, so $150,000 per employee, which doubles your $30 MM.

I don't agree with this one bit. I think that games should be judged unto their own performance, and not relative to one another.

(I think I've got the topic for my next thread )