Old evaluations stated that the Publisher gets about $27 of a $60 game at retail, or 45%. No clue how it is with digital, digital storefronts take more but you also save costs.

Anyway avg $17 for the publisher would put the avg retail price at $38. We're talking EA here, bargain bin after 2 weeks :p Wait for a sale is the norm nowadays.

But I forgot about marketing, which is separate from the gaming budget.

Google: AAA games often spending 50-70% of their total budget on marketing.

So a $100 million game would cost avg $165 million including marketing, putting the avg return per copy at $27.50 and avg retail price at $61.

It's possible.

Meanwhile....

Megabonk - ~3M (Steam est.) - Very low (solo dev)
Hollow Knight - sold 15M+ - cost to develop Very low (~$37k Kickstarter)
Hollow Knight: Silksong - ~5M - cost to develop Very low (small team)
Stardew Valley - sold41M+ - cost to develop Minimal (solo dev)
Palworld - sold 25M+ / 32M players - cost to develop $6.7M
Terraria - sold 64M+ - cost to develop Very low (small team)
Hotline Miami ~ sold 4.9M Steam - cost to develop Very low (2 devs)

The list goes on and on. These massive over bloated budgets are a developer/publisher issue. You don't need 100 million + to make a great game

Idk, it doesn't sound right. Maybe it's because it comes from the perspective of a third party publisher and platform holders take a share from the sales of the game or maybe EA is just paying an absurd amount of money in marketing but having to make 4 times the budget even as an example sounds like an exaggeration. Also the way the guy is presenting his interview "that's why so many games are going multiplatform" makes it look even worst, if he is talking about Xbox we all know the real problem has always been GP not the game's budgets.

In the leaks of Insomniac the Ratchet RA numbers say the game was already making profit after just selling 2.7 million units with a budget of 81M. First party games don't need to pay a share but still for me this sounds like the Ubisoft guy saying people are playing fewer games just to justify the fact that Ubisoft isn't in the best place right now lol.

And this is why I'm more interested in games like Braid, Super Meat Boy, Zzzzz, Fez, Cave Story and others like them. Cave Story was made by just one man. Super Meat boy, two. And they are infinitely more fun, interesting and fresh-feeling than 99% of these hundred-million-dollar-open-world-copy-and-paste fests.

Well, at least in my opinion haha.

But gamers expect so for IP's, People are hating on the ratchet and Clank mobile game but it is way more cheaper than the console game. You can also add vampire survivors on the list.

The number of yearly indie game releases is in the thousands and has been steadily increasing, with over 13,000 on Steam in 2023 and an estimated 18,000 in 2024.

Most indie games fail to break even. You can just as well say it takes a thousand indie games for every major success. It's roughly one indie game released per 7,500 monthly active Steam players.

Good list of 2D games and Palworld, but neither of those games are like The Witcher or Cyberpunk or Metroid Prime or Marvel Spider-Man or the upcoming Wolverine. Gamers like you are always praising indie games while saying every studio should just lower their budget, but I don't think anyone wants Wolverine to be like Silksong or Terraria when it finally comes out. "Small" budget games offer a different experience from big budget games, when will people start to realize that?

Don't make hankerchief calculations with the US Dollar price in mind.

A) Regional pricing is a thing. It's almost never a 1 to 1 conversion to local currencies, but more of the price marketing says they can get away with in a particular market.

B) Outside of salestax countries (e.g. US), the VAT countries have the tax included in the consumer facing price (e.g. 10% Japan, approx 20% Europe), that would need to be deducted from the consumer price. example a EUR70 game, needs to have the tax taken out to get to the revenue (70/120*100) of EUR58.33. This amount then needs to be deducted with any fees from digital storefront, or distributor/importer/retailer. And in the case of physical the costs of production, logistics and possible import tariffs to get to gross profit.

C) Needless to say, games usually do not stay the same price.

D) This gentleman is speaking about his experiences with EA. The EA model might be different than other publishers. E.g. I can imagine a pretty high degree on physical on sports games.

Instead of making one game that costs a hundred million, make ten games that cost ten million each. It'll be easier to recover the costs, cover a bigger audience and have a bettr chance to get a hit IP this way. What's so difficult about this?