How much do the retail price actually go to the publisher? 50%? More? Less? Would they differ %age wise from platform? Ie. would a Wii game publisher get $30 of the $50 retail because they get 60% and a PS3 publisher get $30 of the $60 retail because they only get 50%? How much is typically spent in game promotions? print ads, billboards, etc... Are there places that track budget of game projects? for example many sites track cost of feature films, but I haven't seen that for games...

This is probably negotiated on a deal per deal basis, so there should be no "rule" as to what happens but most likely, the console hardware people would pay a certain amount up front so that the developers could more quickly recover their costs for making it, and they would probably receive a certain amount per sale, in order to encourage them to make a great product. How much in practice? Who knows, that kind of thing won't be heavily advertised b/c it could lead to hurt feelings if somebody isn't getting a big enough peice of the pie.

It depends on the publisher and platform because many large publishers have an ability to negotiate the licencing fees in general as well as for very popular games ... As an example Microsoft might have a standard licencing fee of $8 per copy of a game, Take Two may only pay $7 per game and to make GTA exclusive to the XBox 360 Microsoft could eliminate the licencing fee ... Edit: in other words, on a $60 title a third party publisher probably makes about $20 (in general) where some publishers could make $30 and on certain games $40 ...

HS, I've never heard of completely eliminating the licensing fee. I know Sony paid Take Two a considerable monetary amount for its exclusivity. Take Two simply realized that by going cross-platform would easily exceed any amount of money Sony could offer them, once MS had established themselves. (I'm sure some incentives were also offered by MS) Sony could then only negotiate for timed exclusivity. Although HS is correct, in certain instances these matters are negotiated completely upon a deal-by-deal basis. Close third party relationships, 3rd parties that develop solely for your console, franchise popularity, etc. Though what was considered the industry standard across the board last-gen was $5-6 dollars a game.

It really depends. http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3156044 Great story on Gears of War's costs (a $10m game) 25% (aka $15) goes to pay the art and design guys. 20% ($12) goes to pay the programmers and the engineers. 20% (also $12) goes to your friendly neighborhood retailer. EB / GameStop, whoever. 11.5% ($7) goes to a "Console Owner Fee" - ie. whichever one of the Big Boys made your hardware (Sony, MS, Nintendo.) 7% ($4) goes to marketing, and puts Mad World and Marcus Fenix on MTV. 5% ($3) goes to "market development" -- paying for cardboard Standees of the Gears Crew and elbowing other games out of the way for shelf space at your local retailer. 5% ($3) goes to actually manufacturing and packaging the disc. 5% ($3) is spent paying the Man for IP licenses or maybe hiring some big name voice actors. If your game isn't an original IP, here's where you get dinged by Marvel, Disney, or Ray Liotta's agent. 1.5% (just $1) goes into the publisher's pocket. 1.5% (also $1) goes into the distributor's pocket. 0.3% (about 20 cents) goes into corporate costs. Management, overhead, lawyers, etc. 0.05% (less than 3 cents) go into the cost of paying for the Developer's Hardware. Who knew an SDKs can cost tens of thousands of dollars? It also depends on the cost of the game. I believe the price of the game can effect the % to MS and such. XBLA is a totally different scale. MS takes around 30% of each download for server space, provided you give them a 100% working game. For 50%, MS will take your old game, and re-code it for multi-player and work on XBLA.

^ Thank you, an enlightening article. However, in that case, it belies the oft repeated mantra that it takes 500k in sales for a game to break even. In the case of GoW, the production budget was $10M (assuming it's just art/design/program/engineering), so 45% of x = 10M for break even, so x is roughly $22M for break-even. $22M/$60. So ~367k in sales is breakeven for GoW. Now, I would daresay that GoW is a more expensive game to produce than a typical game. So, if it takes 367k for breakeven on an high cost game on a new platform (the 360). I'd imagine most new games cost LESS than that. So, how can the break even be 500k? 200k sounds like more of a fair number. Now, using the number to revisit the software sales chart. It indicates that all the top 200 bestsellers of 2006 broke even based on the 2006 performance alone. Instead of the 61 indicated by the 500k standard. The 200k seems like a much more realistic number. Otherwise, it would not make sense for so many companies to still be in this business.

I think there are various variables to the issue of the break-even point. MS was the publisher/owner of the game and hardware. I believe this might attribute *some* help in terms of fees. Not much, but maybe $1-2 per unit sold. Game budgets really vary from game to game. I believe some games are possibly made for near $1m USD to $5m USD - I'd assume *most* games are in this area that are cheap(er) 360 games (any of the $40 titles comes to mind), while mid buget games are $5m-10m. However, there are a few games that are major cost-crunchers to far exceede GOW. GOW was a pretty good deal on the 360 due to no licensing fees for middleware such as Unreal Engine (that could play a huge factor in costs per game), which saved the team probably around $500k to 1m. Blue Dragon and Lost Planet, for example are both $20m+ games. That would indicate a break even point of around 750k units (which LP has beat) and around 900k needed for BD (assuming $25m game) - not really "horrible" numbers needed, but daunting as BD might get close to that barely. See, the secret of a system is how well the software moves vs. the cost. The higher dev costs on 360/PS3 games are there, I am sure. However, the games ARE $10 more to cover the dev costs (that $10 isnt for anything else, buddies). This is why not everyone are jumping on the Wii ship - there is a bunch of money to be made from 360/PS3 games. IE, the 360 moved 2m units of software (roughly). The vast majority were $60 titles, or most likely around $100m (or so) in s/w. Compare that to maybe 1.1m Wii s/w units @ $50 (high, but still) for $55m. Which company will a dev use? Also, there is the huge issue of digital distribution - that can cut the $12 price of the retail store down significantly (maybe $6 in server fees?) - which is a big reason some PC games are digi-distributed near exclusively such as Galactic Civs 2... I believe they ended up making somewhere near $30 or $35 of the $40 the game cost for profit - and GalCiv2 only cost them $800k.

The "cost" of development is (roughly) $100,000 per developer-year, plus the costs of licenced technology (and in the future the licenced game assets) ... Gears of War only cost $10 Million to make because it was (roughly) an 8 hour game with a reasonably focused multiplayer component ... They could have (easily) spent $20 or $30 Million to produce a moderately long (16-24 hours) single player campaign with the multiplayer options that were available in the previous generation.

I was at a presentation from Starbreeze (makers of the Darkness, Chronicles of Riddick), and they spoke about developing costs and publishers etc. It usually goes down this way: For every game sold Starbreeze gets maybe 10%, if they're lucky. With that money, they have to first pay back for the developing costs for that game. If Starbreeze couldn't pay back all the money for the developing costs through royalties, their "debt" is gone. If they can pay back, only THEN can they make money for themselves. In the case of the critically acclaimed Chronicles of Riddick, Starbreeze only barely managed to break even. They never actually got any money from sales... It's tough being a developer.

I just wanna say Killzone2 passed 20million quite a few months ago... and with ~200 people working on it around the world. I would say add 1million/month to the game budget. I'd say it's at close to 23million by now, and when it is launched at the end of 2007, to be at or over 30million.