At the risk of drawing ire, I wonder if it would just be more profitable for Sony to go 3rd party with their handheld development. The Vita is a great system, but I'm not sure if Sony wouldn't just be better served developing for mobile or (god forbid) the 3DS.

Yea, mostly. But I think I bring up Demon' souls here: It was released first only in Japan, but was such a weird/great game that it got very late world wide release and sits now at 1,61m. I think that is amazing for such a hardcore crazy game... Then when we have some "big titles" releasing that sell barely 1 million, that's what makes them feels like a failure.
And yea big games need to sell big or you and your game franchise is doomed.

COD sells 20+ million on a yearly basis
Assassins Creed sells about 10 million on a yearly basis

so yeah, being a million seller isn't a big deal anymore. Especially considering the massive development costs.

a million is still a big deawl for a loet of games - jsut bec ause some games sell 20+ million doesn't mean tejhat the boundary has been lowered in my opinion.

*adjusts shades*

Necrobumping a three days old thread, suspicious grammar... Okay, get out of the car and walk a straight line.

Last gen (PSWii60) had the most gamers of ANY generation. So yes, I believe 1 million right now for last gen games is not very successful. For this new gen it's a pretty damn good number for launch.

There are games this gen that didn't hit break even at 5m sales - Red Dead Redemption, GTAV and GTAVI.

I would imagine it's true for games like Destiny that anything below 5m will be considered a failure and really they're expecting to hit the 10m+ mark. Destiny is a bit of an exception as Activision really only put all of nothing into their launches, and they're putting absolutely everything behind that game, but still once one publisher starts to play this big budget gambling game it won't be long until others are forced to join.

One expense that's exploded you forgot about is marketing - in the NES / SNES era games had adverts but it wasn't really a big thing. Marketing budgets today can far exceed development budgets (I think COD:MW2 was over $200m) - and that can quickly turn a break even point well beyond the 5m market let alone 1m. I think developement budgets are going to somewhat plateau this gen - with easier hardware to develope on and no real 'rise' in resolution - but marketing is gonna go up up up.

When games have to lower their retail price, become part of a bundle, or sell a quarter of a milliom across four or five platforms just to reach that number, then yes. I don't think they earned any of the prestige that a legit million seller has.

If the game makes a profit and sells a million on its own at full MSRP, then it's a winner.

It's a great question and there's quite a few great answers in the thread, but the OP cuts it all too short by answering the very question being asked...

I wonder what publisher still profits by selling 1m copies of a game. Nintendo must have back in the Wii days, but does that hold true now as well? And I guess indies are happy as Hell when selling 1m; but is there anyone else?

 Capcom seemed pretty happy with Dragon's Dogma and that was around the 1m mark, and definitely had a bigger budget feel to it then most indie games or Wii games. Games tend to carry a higher retail price in Japan though, so large Japan sales can generally translate to higher revenue then the equivelent for a $60 game in the USA or European equivalent. 

 I think a lot of games that Konami, Namco, Capcom etc make in Japan are fine with the 1m (Full price) sales threshold, for games which arn't part of their bigger franches (RE, MGS). Afterall games like Yakuza and Tales are apparently huge successes and are at the 1m mark. I really doubt any western developer uses that metric anymore however.