@NJ5

is Wii Play the HIGHEST profit making game ever?

you seem to know the the actual % of money that goes to devs..

Then there's all the songs to license...

Source

I'm just guessing based on various articles and developer interviews I've read. I'm pretty sure most of the people in this thread are posting quite accurate information.

On a very quick guess, shouldn't Pokemon have made more profit than Wii Play? Wii Play is bundled with a remote so the profit per copy is probably not that high. Then there's Tetris ;)

@NJ5

Are we talking about Pokemon Red/Blue.....I dunno...maybe at that time its "engine" was costly

if its Pkemon Gold/Silver then maybe yeah..

Home is not a game but that must have cost a huge amount of money to make. However that is something which can be called an investment, it will be here for the rest of the PS3's lifecycle, go onto PS4 and all the advertising will pay for the project.

As BengaBenga already said there are too many variables ...

If it is a first party game, the fact that it is developed, published and licenced by the same company means that a large portion of the revenue (possibly up to $40 on a $60 game) is collected by 1 company. This would work out to a company breaking even on a $40 Million game after they sold 1 Million copies.

When you start considering second party games, third party games that are developed by the publisher, third party games that are developed externally, whether a game was funded through existing cash or from credit, currency value changes, and about 100 other factors, it becomes really difficult to estimate.

A (fairly) safe estimate for the break even point in general would probably be 50,000 copies for every $1 Million budget for a disc based game.

Nintendoman you could have at least read other posts before making yours. I already gave you the cost for Lost Planet, $40million. 20million for development, 20million for advertising. GoW cost $10mill however that is without advertising costs, that were probably also in the region of $20mill if not higher (I personally certainly saw more adverts for GoW than LP). GoW cost so little because Epic basically already had the game half made because of the unreal engine.

Games like Valkyria Chronicles which dont have great sales also do not have huge budgets. With that said I hope that game is making some profit as a second would be simply fantastic.

Yup, especially after I explained why a high budget costs more than 45M$. I think 10-12M$ was the price for games released early in the generation that didn't really take that great graphics. We're talking about the highest budget games here: GTA, Killzone 2, FFXIII and Gran Turismo. I also think that both FFXIII and GT will cost about the same as GTAIV to make. GT5 because it's a massive game with extremely detailed car and FFXIII because SE spends a lot on CGI and they are extremely inefficient unlike Epic.

MGS4 took 4 years and was around 60 mil without publicity costs, was it not ? Quite possibly the most expensive [purely development costs] game so far.

To break even, around 1 mil copies, maybe a bit more.

@Godot - how is SE inneficient compared to EPIC ?

Corridor shooters with simplistic story and very few cinematics and dialogue are infinitelly less complex and cheaper to produce that RPGs with hours of cinematics and dialogue and huge maps with lots of stuff and interaction. Of course a FF like game would cost much more than a Gears like game.