Also keep in mind Rainbow six did the 1 million in the USA alone in only 1 week! I think turok took longer and is worldwide but still not a very long time. I mean does it matter how long it takes to get to 1 million?

No, we don't know how much every game costs. But we have a very good idea -- many games with high production values are reported, and ballparks are often reported.  Next gen games are reported to start around 15 million dollars as a production budget, and increase from there.  Many short development games cost $20-$40 million this generation.  Many developers have stated that they need more than a million units sold to break even.

A million unit seller for the Wii, in most cases, is almost certain to be profitable.  Some exceptions to this would be Nintendo first party games like Smash Brothers Brawl and Mario Galaxy, which certainly had very high production costs.  Fully orchestrating 300 songs for Smash Brothers alone would have been extremely pricey, and there is so much more in that game than that.

Sure, moving to multiplat doesn't necessarily add a ton of cost, depending on whether it was planned for, etc. But the cost of next gen games is already so high that adding 10% - 20% is a fairly significant additional cost requiring at least 10%-20% additional sales.

And this generation Sony is taking more money than ever before out of each game sold.  So is Microsoft, although still less than Sony.  This is part of the reason games cost $60: MS and Sony have more expensive hardware to recoup costs for and get profitable with in addition to the higher cost of development.

If we use some figures that are widely used on VGChartz we can calculate whether a million is worthwile.

It is estimated multiple times that it costs about $20 million to develop a (good) HD title.

- It is estimated that developers recieve about $20 per sold game.
- Let's say Turok and RSV2 cost a little less, say $15 million base cost on (most of the time) 360 + 2 million for the PS3 port. = $17 million.
- This is without any additional costs like advertising, which can add millions of dollars.

So to sell 1 million = 20 million revenue = 3 million profit. This is a very marginal return on investment of 15% (again, this is without advertising etc).

If you bring your money to the bank you can have 5% return, invest it in shares 10% return, so 15% return is not very spectacular.

Well it seems obvious that multiplatform is a worthwhile decision on the part of developers otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.  The real question is what figures make it worthwhile.  I'd also guess that 20% cost is a very soft number that could easily go much higher or lower for certain games.

Well there is DLC , and in game advertisement which is becoming and ever increasingly viable source of income.