It's sold around 60k in Japan so far. How much would a game like this need to sell to break even?

question: whos publishing it here? Koei or nintendo?

Probably Nintendo; when we approached Koei about whether it would be localised, they said that was all up to Nintendo.

Looks pretty low-fi in the visual department from what little video I've watched online so it was probably fairly cheap to make. But still if that anatomy of a $60 video game is anything to go by the publisher+platform holder cut is max $40. So with 60K sales you're looking at $2.4 million in revenue (yen equivalent of course) back to the developer+publisher+platform owner. I suspect as Nintendo is the publisher they paid KT up front for the development of the game, perhaps with a back end deal if the game sold over X amount so Nintendo is getting 100% of the publisher cut of the retail price.

Could Fatal Frame have been made and marketed for under $2.5 million (yen equivalent)? It seems like that's a very lowbudget in this day and age of game development. But maybe the game didn't cost much more than that to make, given Nintendo and KT will know it's a very low selling game and that they only planned to release it in Japan. They're hardly going to spend 10s of millions on making a game that will never recoup that sort of cost.

If they spend $200K to localise the game for the west (which will basically be voice acting and text translation) and they sell 100K in the west then the total revenue to Nintendo (incl Japan sales) could be about $6.5 million. If the game cost $5 million to make, market and localise then they will have made a decent return (23% return on investment is pretty decent). But you'd think a budget of $5 million for this game with the intention of only releasing in Japan would be a really bad call as the chances of getting a return on that investment from Japan alone would be very slim. So I'm guessing the buget would be a bit less than $5 million, but probably higher than what the game has earned from Japan sales alone.

You might actually have underperforming (compared to expectations) sales in Japan to thank for getting the game localised, because if the game had sold >100K Nintendo might have decided to bank that small but positive return and move on.

As for the soft core porn aspect of having the girl run around in scant amounts of clothing for no reason than sexual titillation, why not just go the whole fapping hog and have a buck naked option? That will surely get sales pumping, among other things. If they did a PC release you know there would be a total nude mod within weeks.

It was announced in the Nintendo Direct in Europe. Don't know about America though.

I need a new change of pants after this.

Even though this probably won't sell as wlel as it should I'm still going to grab it, my friends like to watch me get scared shitless at the Project Zero series but it's still worth it to both scare myself, entertain them and now it seems "entertain" myself.

It was confirmed for NA by Bill Trinen.

I just have to ask: What is that stuff on her left shoulder?

They added a couple years on paper for their age in the EU/UK release, but they were still the same character models as the Japanese release which looked younger.  This time on the Wii U game the original Japanese release character models are older to begin with.  The game is also likely to have a rating of PEGI 18 in the EU and UK since that is the closest equivalent to the Japanese rating of CERO D (17+) with out going under.  And it will be rated M in NA too.

That being said if they did decide to remove the bonus costumes for the Western release then they should replace them with some other safer but fancy and neat looking bonus costumes, because no one wants less content.  And since people are already aware of the other costumes existence, replacement costumes would be a necessary but good trade off.  It all depends on how much work Nintendo/Tecmo want to put in the localization, but if the game is rated PEGI 18 and M then keeping the original bonus costumes shouldn't be an issue either.