I doubt 100 million, I think 60-80million, but I guess 100M is possible

But they will be able to break even + profit easily

The realities of a really big game published/developed by the same company are staggering, in a positive way on HD consoles compared to the Wii and compared to lesser selling HD games.

1. Retailers actually pay more for a game in higher demand, it wouldn't surprise me if they paid $50 or even $52 for each title. Remember most of the copies will be gone the first day for a highly anticipated release. Its easy money for a lot of retailers and very efficient.

2. Console royalties? I would be surprised if it didn't average out to be $5 or less for this title. Not only do the royalty rates go down the more copies shipped, they also go down for highly anticipated titles.

3. Shipping? When you're shipping a two boxes with 60 copies each to a retail store, how much does that come to per title?

4. Advertising? Microsoft and Sony will add their own advertising to the mix. Its also averaged over the massive retail sales.

5. Packaging/Market development? Retailers will give them the best shelves and packaging costs are cheap since hundreds of millions of game/dvd cases are made every year.

6. Special editions? Extra money!

So in all I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pull in an average of $45 in the hand after all charges, taking into account the LTD edition sales with marketing costs applied against the total number of games shipped rather than per individual title.

I agree with all you say. But not with advertising, even if Sony and MS do help with advertise, S-E probably is going to spend huge amounts in marketing, remember when S-E CEO said they would make FF be the best knowed franchise again, and everyone would hear its name in whole world and they wouldn't save efforts (money) to achieve this. Expect Halo-GTA-WSR-like marketing campaign for this game.

edit:Since we are already talking about marketing, MS should spend huge amounts of money to make current owners of 360 buy this. Looks at the most wanted in america, both versions tops but the 360 one is always below the ps3 one even 360 having more than the double of base in this region. Well, FF is always the best game to start playing jrpg, so it shouldn't be that hard to convince shooter fans to try it.

@Bolded - I've been trying to wrap my head around what you wrote here for several minutes, and I don't understand it. What are you trying to say? I got the rest of your post............

square enix doesn't do special editions the game when it hits its english version it's complete. no DLC no nothing.
they do international version with the english voices for japan, and a few new sidequests.

Well, I own the FFXII special edition...

Yeah right. Impossible. That all sounds nice and all with your numbered 1-6 list, but how do you explain that the publishers have so low profits?

I have heard no one even try to explain this. People are just fantasizing numbers here.

SQnix can be easily compared to Take Two, who has GTA4 as their mega game, selling +10 million. The same principle should be there - if FF can get $45 then GTA should be too. But we all know Take Two has been losing money for years. Not even the GTA release quarters are profitable - despite people claiming publishers rake in $40-45 per copy from the first shipment.  

SquareEnix has low profit margins as well.

Since advertising is a fixed cost, you don't apply it on a per title basis as it costs the same whether you sell a single copy or not. So whilst they are paying huge quanties, Sony and Microsoft are also paying huge amounts too and in the end it will be a split effort. If MS and Sony both do say $10M worth and SE does $40M then dividing that over say 7M copies makes it quite a small expenditure relative to overall revenue.

Xbox 360 owners have bought JRPGs in at least as high a relative proportion as PS3 owners in America so they will have no trouble going for the title.

@SaviourX: A game which sells over a longer period of time earns the publisher less money per title and costs more per title to keep on the shelves than a game which sells millions in a single day.

Take two examples assuming Gears of War and Mario and Sonic sold similar amounts @ $50 each, say 5M copies for examples sake. Since the Gears of War game sold most of the copies up front the shipping costs, market development payments to retailers, retail margins are lower and the average sale price is higher. Also the ROI is quicker and any loans/interest costs taken to create the game are lower as well. Even if the Gears game cost more to make than the Mario game, it could still be more profitable and thats ignoring the royalty payments Sega paid to Sony to use Mario in the game and even the $10 extra that an HD game costs at launch.

I think the development for the game is very expensive not just because of how huge a series the game is but because of the type of engine they are putting in this game. Not to mention the porting the game on the Xbox 360 and how development on the PS3 version takes longer. This game has been in development for about 5 years or so now. If the development cost of the game is going to be $100 million, I think the game should make at least a quarter of what the development cost is back when it comes to lifetime sales.

I'd feel sorry for Squeenix if this gets lackluster sales.