DirtyP2002 said:
So with 150k copies sold, we already have 22.5 million USD revenue. How much is it to develop such a game? 10% might be for MS, so that leaves 20 million for the small studio.
Break-even day one would be really nice. |
MS take a baseline 30% and when they publish the game (Trails Evolution is published by Microsoft Game studios) they take a further cut which depends on the game, they will negotiate bassed on the amount of premotion and how big the game is, it used to be a flat 30% leaving the developer with 40% but they revised that policy in 2009. And as XBLA games have to have a publisher there isn't really any way arround paying the publisher fee tho I have no idea whether EA etc would take a bigger cut and MSGS could probably offer better premotion anyway.
Sony, Nintendo, Steam, Origin etc all take similar cuts, it's still far better margines than retail where the the publisher gets under 50% of the retail price and the developer (if indipendent) gets a small slice of that. As far as I know XBLA is the only one that requires a registered publisher, the others will let indie devs self publish so they can get a bigger cut but of course will have to do their own premotion. MS do have XBL indie games for the smaller devs but that has it's own issues.
