hehe I wish i had a pic of Dr. Evil right now from austin powers  lol

It's on the DS, the platform that will the most popular video game in the history of the world and everything.

Japan generally prefers games with a strong local multiplayer. DQ9 has that, and I can see it having legs of Monster Hunter. Not to mention that it's had the longest development cycle for any retail DS game.

DQIX has a couple thing in its favor:

1) Virtually no other games release this week

2) Its a bit cheaper than most DQ games (~$60 vs ~$80)

3) One save slot. If multiple people in a household want to play it, they'll buy multiple copies.

4) DS has a userbase of 27m in Japan, which is only 10% lower than the worldwide 360 base, and over 20% higher than the world PS3 base. Hell its more than half as big as the world Wii base.

5) I doubt this game cost more than $5m to make (which is actually quite high for a DS game). If Square-Enix gets $25/copy or something they can make over $100m profit on this game in Japan which can pay for huge development costs of prettier games releasing on smaller bases.

It really is just crazy. Dragon Quest games are pretty fun, but dam. lol

it could happen, unless everyone planning on buying it preordered it

I think you are being way too conservative here.

I would think that just the developer salaries alone would be higher than $5 million for the 3 and a half year development time.

Even if it cost $20 million to make the game will probably still net over $100 million in profit.

Pick a number. 50 Full Time staff working on it for three years and six months at an average of $60,000/employee...$10.5m. The engine, cartridges, etc probably add a couple million more. But I don't think its much more than that.

Most staff members at game companies don't get payed real well.

@thesource

double your employee costs. They may have an average salary of 60k, but you didn't add benefits and other overhead costs. So probably closer to $20m if it was truly 50 people over 3.5 years.

@slightly off topic

the thread title right here is why they shouldn't have made FFXIII for PS3. FF does exceptionally well, but the PS3 install base is actually limiting potential sales. Maybe it will cause a huge boost in PS3 hardware, but if it doesn't you are pretty much guaranteed that it cost them a lot of sales.

Let's go with that logic and say every single game released should only come out for DS.

Now I get it... you're just trolling...