So my question is...wouldn't it be insanely easy to break a profit then? Most games can pass 100k sold without a sweat. It must be more complicated than that.

Yeah, $2 million seems more like an average PSP budget rather than a Wii budget.

Yeah, I doubt more than 10% of Wii games can sell under 100k and be profitable. But the point is, it is the only home console where selling 100k has even a shot at being profitable. I figure Wii games cost $3.5m or so on average to make.

Going by the $21 publishers get, you still only have to sell about 170,000 copies to make a bit of money on a Wii title.

What I should have said is while most Wii games probably can't profit until 170,000+, some can much lower than that. DS is cartridge based so you still have to sell a fair number of titles. If average DS development cost $1,000,000 you would need to sell 67,000 units or so. It may be a bit higher than that, as I've seen interviews with Reggie which essentially say a DS title can usually be profitable at 100,000.

That is why I wonder how sales are OK, with such a low revenue. RFF is no shovelware either.

You have to remember that Rune Factory Frontier was only published by Xseed in America.  They were not the developer, and they did not publish the game in Japan or Europe.  That means that their costs are lower.

Everyone's talking about the sales and what's profitable, but I'd like to see an analysis of what's typically required (in man-hours) for a game like Rune Factory. For example, if it takes a team of 20 people (counting 10 programmers, 4 artists, 3 musicians, 2 play-testers, and 1 project lead) about 1 year to develop a game from scratch, then that's roughly 41,600 man-hours (40x52x20). If you figure an average pay rate of $30/hr, then that's around $1.25M for the total labor involved, but without distribution and manufacturing costs. I would think you'd be able to make most smaller niche Wii games for around $1.5M or so. If that's the case, then you'd only need 71,428 copies of the game sold (at a profit of $21 per unit) to break even. Thus, it seems plausible to me that their target was to sell over 75K units.

Yet I doubt they only had 20 people and the pay can be a great variable.

Apparently, a decent estimate of a games development cost can be found by the following formula:

(# of people working on game) × (# of years in development) × $100,000 = development cost

You may think that $100,000 seems high, but it is not just for salary.  It just seems to match up well with the little bits of info that we've seen over time.

Like I said above, Xseed is only the publisher for America.  They did not develop the game or publish the game in Japan or Europe.  That means those costs associated with the other regions don't apply to them.  The development costs are probably split somehow with the other two publishers (Marvelous and Rising Star).  That is probably why Xseed said that these sales are 'OK'.  They probably covered their own costs or made some small profit.

Another thing to remember is that only about 20% of games on the market are profitable.  The other 80% only break even or lose money.

So does anyone know a typical count of man-hours used on these smaller Wii games? I was just throwing out some numbers I considered somewhat plausible, but I'd love to find out some hard data. If the Wii is supposed to be so easy to program for, then you'd think that some of these games could get by with very few people involved.