I say first and second party because logic tells me that the console company funding the game would get back more money for every game sold compared to a 3rd party.

Sony are making a LOT of first/second party games and the ones that have released sell well but nothing special. Each one usually breaks a million with a few breaking 2+ million. I know development costs vary with HD games but what would be a rough estimate for sales needed for a game to break even? Some Sony first party games like Singstar Abba would not have cost much to make yet sell very nicely, same cannot be said about Resistance 2.

I admit I am worried about the sales for first and second party Sony games, would hate for Sony to stop first party game development due to not making profit. I WANT MY GT5 DAMMIT SONY!

I think they get profit from the first and second party games so no problem about that

Don't worry there making all kinds of money with there games, of course it depends on the game and how much it cost to make but an average $20 million HD first/second party game should break even with around a million sold. I think Sony gets like $20 or 30$ from each first party game. (<---could be wrong)

LBP is an obvious mini-cash cow for them, the amount of DLC which can been spent is absolutely amazing. GT5: Prologue also must have paid off a fair share of the full games development, add another spec and it starts selling again. :O

The big question is how much it's costing Sony to develop a 1st party IP for the PS3. It could be pretty bad, given the notoriety of the PS3's development....Difficulties.

However, on a $60 game, about $40 should be profit to the developer, minus retail markup, marketing, and packaging costs.

So on a $20m game (should be average for a PS3 title, but I'm gonna say it could be a little higher), they need at least 500,000 units to break even *provided* there aren't variables - they could make slightly less due to unforseen costs in an easy-cheezy $40 estimate for profits per game. It could be lower due to incentives or overseas costs, but should be a good average.

I'd say anything over 1m sold through is assured to make them money.

Most of the first/second party Sony games easily break a million which is good, games like GT5 however would probably need 3 million sales to break even though. Thanks to GT5: Prologue that number is probably down to 2 million but this is all guess work.

What I do know is that it will be darn hard for Killzone 2 to full a profit. :/

I guarantee GT5 is already paid off thanks to GT5P

(as long as GT5 doesn't cost like 100 million to make, but either way GT5 is going to be nothing but $_$ for Sony)

Yeah and not only that, Sony will probably strip 100 or so cars from the disc and sell it on as DLC knowing how this generation has been. -_-

Well the only data we know is Uncharted, which cost $20m, 2 years of full development with 90 people. Before that, they had 5 or so people on pre-production, and they had to create a new engine, and completely change the way they code games

They expect Uncharted 2 to cost them another $20m

So then if Killzone 2 cost 60 million it would need to sell 3 million copies to BREAK EVEN?