i probably worded the title wrong but here is my example..

New Super Mario Bros - sold 3,000,000 in America

i took the 3,000,000 copies that were sold and multiplied it buy the price Nintendo were asking for $34.99

i got $104,970,000.00 ok does that mean they made that much because of this game...am i wrong?

i posted this thread becasue i was curious

You sure are asking a lot of 'interesting' questions lately...

That would be the revenue that was generated from the game. Calculating profit is difficult, because of the unknown development costs, as well as the added expenses of publishing a game, such as marketing. However, because it is a first party game, they do not have to pay royalties, for example.

On the topic of Nintendo making money.... They make a profit on all the hardware they make, they tend to sell enough copies of first party games to always turn a profit, AND they get paid for every single 3rd party game that is sold on their platform.

Not going to post the "It prints Money"

Well, they would've made that much if there was no overhead. But selling a game does incur costs to the person selling.

For starters, you have to make it (both creating the game (developing) and making the carts). You also have to ship the games to the stores selling them and those stores also want a profit.

Now I don't know exactly how large the margins are at the store, but my guess is that it's not unreasonable to take out some 50% of the customer price as overhead.
(For consoles this is different. Usually the stores sell them at 0 profit)

So Nintendo would've made about $52.485.000* minus what it cost them to develop it and market it for the New Super Mario game. Still a lot of money tho ;)

*) This is per my 50% guess so don't take this as gospel truth.

...Until now....

50% is a good rule of thumb to use.

so NSMB probably has brought home about $50 mln for nintendo. in america.

estimate to your heart's content how much it took nintendo to develop the game.

EDIT: but since nintendo doesn't have to pay itself royalties on the DS, it's actually more than 50%.  probably more like 60-65%. 

In order to figure out if a game made profit or not, you have to know the estimated development cost plus advertisement costs. Then, knowing the sale price and the amount of copies sold, you know how much revenue was produced from the game.

The number you stated, $104,970,000 is the revenue. This is not complete profit made from the game. Retailers take a certain cut from each game they sell, the publisher has to pay shipping costs, the development team must be paid for their work, etc, etc, etc. Lots and lots of costs. So, a good chunk of the revenue is never seen by the publisher.

whoa...they're like...scary fast!

Yeah. It is an accelerated version because of how much faster they have been printing money with the increasing success of the DS.

I wont even bother puting up the Wii one. 

So I lied... sue me. 

but the revenue is correct right??? i know they dont see that much becasue they have to cut some of that money to development costs and workers retailers and stuff right??