I see some rediculous expectation for units sold for games in order to consider, not a flop.

What exactly is the break-point?

I suppose it is based a lot on the dev cost.

If so, on avg, how many units on Wii/360/PS3 needed to be sold in order to be considered avg?

Many people also quickly put games into flop list after just a few weeks release. What is he "appropriate" week# before deciding whether a game flops or not?

I guess the best example would be SMG where everyone say it flop based on its first few week sales.

And then there are also games that sold extremely well a year or more after its release and suddenly jump over to the mega-success list. 

I'm guessing 1 million sales minimum for PS3/360 games, perhaps slightly less for Wii and pc.

@ daleklord, it can't be 1m for all PS3 games, only the big ones (Uncharted, R and C, HS) the dev of Dynasty Warriors Gundam said that the game had to sell 500,000 to break even which it didn't so had to be ported to 360

200k for a decent Wii game I think.

It largely depends on expectations for whether it is a flop or not, but I think the break even for PS3 & 360 is likely around 300-400k on the average. Obviously some titles will be less but some will also be much more.

As for the Wii I would probably guess around 180-240k or so for the average.

To be clear this is speculation based mostly on developer reactions to game sales and narrowing it down based on that.

It all depends...

In the Wii, you're looking at slightly higher than PS2/Xbox dev costs. Of course, that only applies to the typical "video game" type of games. In situations like Trauma Center or other extremely simplistic games (think Brain Age), it's much less. They could probably sell 100k and still come even... Which is part of why there is so much shovelware on the Wii (the other part being that Nintendo does not have a quality certification program to publish games on the system... and people call MS and Sony whores. In Nintendo's world, you pay the fees, you publish the game. Probably a layover and compensation from when they pissed off every third party dev in the world during the 80s and 90s.). :D

In the 360 camp, information like this is a little more available. Capcom has gone on record by stating that they needed 700k to break even on games like Dead Rising and Lost Planet. Considering the top-shelf nature of both these games, that's a pretty good benchmark. Maybe a real blockbuster like Halo or Mass Effect needed more but at least we have a number to work with from Capcom.

In the PS3 camp, things are more ambiguous but don't expect them to differ much from the 360 camp. From most reports, things are a little more expensive to develop on the PS3 but they're close to on par with 360 development. Use 360 numbers and maybe fudge it a bit north and you should be okay.

Seems i was a quite a way off with my "1 million", a report by the almighty British Broadcasting Corporation said that on average, PS3 games cost $15 million to make before marketing so i was basing my response on that. If a Wii game needs only 240k would a DS game need even less?

I'd say 250k is a success for most games, 500k for the bigger budget A games, 1 million for the AAA titles, especially those expensive PS3 games.

As for when they can be declared, that really depends on how the game sells. I'd say you really can't write off a game if it's moving 10k units per week or more. If that game can sell 10k units per week for a year, that's 500k units. So don't look at launch day or first week sales, declare the patient dead once sales stagnate.

What amazes me is if one studio has four big-budget PS3 titles with a 850k break-even, and three of them hit 1m sold because of great reviews, and the fourth one is Lair and sells 300k , the grand total is, uh, -100k. Yes, despite having three out of four million sellers, they lose 100k*$15=$1,500,000. 3/4 is even optimistic for big PS3 games looking at the charts now. How long will third-parties endure this?

I would say that not many third parties are starting development on PS3 exclusives at this point unless Sony is throwing the moneyhat at them. Every third party PS3 game has bombed or barely tread water to this point. It's ridiculous to think that any more developers with a brain will think of starting a PS3-only game at this point.

It makes too much sense not to multi-plat everything between the PS3 and 360. The 360 is selling software like crazy and to leave it out of the equation is corporate suicide unless the developer makes a Japanese-centric game and then you'd have to be cork-on-the-fork stupid not to put it on the Wii.