For me the million mark is always a great yardstick, and it fits the costs info that mrstickball put up.

if you like the game .. one copy for you would be enough
if you don't like it 8488249058295802millions will not be enough !

Right. And my numbers are merely guesstimates based on what I assume a certain game would cost, for that kind of budget.

However, unlike the movie industry, we rarely know what the budget of a title is - big or small, we know very little. Some Xbox 360 games have been quoted in the $20m range, then you got Gears being made for as little as $10m.

And on the Wii side, you look at a game like "Carnival Games" and think "they couldn't of made that for more than $1-2M USD", then look at Red Steel's $12m budget...It can be topsy turvy, but I think my estimates should show atleast what the bare minimums are for a game.

And high budget can be very relative: Final Fantasy VII, and Shemmue cost more, considering inflation, than Halo 3, I believe. Mario 64 cost more (if I remember right) than Red Steel.

 No sorry, I forgot to say that bundled sales don't count.

Also you can't combine red, blue and green so that doesn't count either. 

Id say for a game to be considered a succses (sales wise) it has to sell 1m+ copies, or get a rating of 90%+ from several majour reviewers.

good is 500k

succesful or ecellent is 1 million

 arbitrary numbers make no sense, every game from every publisher will have different expectations for success, I really doubt

I really doubt, say Atlus, to expet any of the games they publish to sell half of a million copies 

depends on the game
if SSBB sold only a million LT, I and many others would call it a failure because it has high expectations. However, for most games, the 1 million sold is the mark to reach

1mil, thats over 60million dollars, that should cover up the money they spent to make it, and a few more dollars in the bank