Some people had it pretty spot on. It's all relative to the actual development costs. If a game doesn't reach a financial breakeven, then the game is said to be in the red, or not profitable. Once it hits the breakeven, anything more puts that game in the black, or making a profit.

At the end of the day, a $50 game has a take-home for a publisher of about $30. So dependent on development costs, the breakeven varies.

So at $30/copy sold, a game with a $3 mil budget (average Wii game) would have to sell 100k copies to reach its breakeven, whereas a HD game might have a 15 mil budget, would have to sell 500k copies to reach its breakeven

257,843 give or take 11 copies.

Depends on factors like platform, development and total cost.

you have to factor in the radiaton and weather condition

Million half. Maybe more if it is a superproduction like MGS4, FFXIII, or a Zelda game.

Depends on marketing costs too which a lot of people are not mentionning and can be a significant portion of the cost for some games.

I think the 1 million figure for a typical HD game sounds right.

For MGS4 I would pin it at 2.5-3 million copies, around 4 million copies for GTA4.

I don't think we have had many big HD titles flop yet this gen.

GTA4 is at 10 Mill, MGS4 about to hit the 3 million mark.

Even games like Heavenly sword are over the 1 million mark..


Flops would be games like Haze which definitly didn't recoup costs. ( on top of development costs the game got TV adds)..

Ninja Gaiden 2 is probably not generating much profit at the time either but if tecmo goes the way of the previous iterations and release a definitive version a la black later on they should probably be able to generate some profit...

 At this point GH3 is probably still the non Nintendo game that has generated the most profit this gen.

Close behind should be GTA4, Halo3 and CoD4.

Depends on everything. Budgets will change from developer to developer.

Management is also important. Epic and Naughty Dog have done well (both of there games were >$20 mil) whereas Guerilla is getting up there with MGS4.

Yea it all depends. Say A game costs $60to buy and it sells 1million. So that's $60 million but u have to take account on other expenses such as shipping to retailers and the retailers getting a chunk of that money. And the other expense include advertising and maybe paying websites to review the game.

It has been said a lot but basically

Money made>Development cost

The higher the development cost, the more it make. So some Wii games that cost little to make will be profitable at about 100k, but big titles may need up towards 1million. (NOTE:These numbers are just made up estimates)