500,000 copies sold? 1 million?

what about 5 million?

i am curious because we look at sales to games like littlebigplanet and wii music,two games that are considered to be flops sales wise by many and yet lbp is over 1.5 million and wii music is closing in on 2 million.. how come these games are "flops"?

to me, for new games, that is a great amount of copies sold.

what does a game need top sell in order to be succesful? 

If it sells over a million I consider it to be a success, the reason why games like LBP and wii music are considered flops (in my mind they definitely are not) is because they were hype so much that people were thinking they would sell over 5 million easily so the people who thought it'd sell that much consider it to be a flop. And Wii Music is a "Wii" titled game and so far every "Wii" titled game has sold extremely well, but everyone kinda knew Wii music wasn't going to be as big as the other "Wii" titled games, so it shouldn't be considered a flop if it's closing in to 2 million.

well I don't want to throw in flop for my explanation cause i see them more as failures than total flops.

But for like huge internet hyped and budget games like Halo, GTA, Final Fantasy, and Killzone 2, I expect at least 5 million or else it is a failure.

Otherwise typical normal games like gears, resistance, madden, guitar hero, and other known franchises that come out I expect at least 1 million.

For new franchises or ip's I think a sucess between 250k-500k. I think if they get that it did great and warrants a sequal and more budget put into next game.

Of course games like Lair and stuff that goes out of ordinary and whips a huge budget on a new IP is always a diffferent story. And why make the budge of Killzone 2 so damn high and so much time put into it when the first one wasn't well recieved at all is also beyond me.


And this reasoning I use is also getting screwed up by the HD consoles. The damn development costs are tricky. I mean some great new IP's like Uncharted, heavenly sword, gears, assassins creed and stuff seemed to have a big budget that getting only 500k would be a huge financial problem and need like a million.

It depends on the game. Wii Music and LBP I consider to be successes.

It depends on the brand power of the game being sold. Niche games are a success even if they sell 250K, let alone 500K. (And the developer should already start to make a profit)

As for the big guys like Mario, Zelda, Halo, GTA, FF, they'd better break at least 3 million or it's a big shame.