Thanks! (For both parts).

 It's been over a year since Mario Kart released, while The Conduit is still new. Also, you can only play multiplayer online with The Conduit, while Mario Kart is still awesome in local play.

There is that, and I would not want to call HVS liars. So you're probably right.

In actuality, if they lost money and didn't tell us, they would get in legal trouble. Lies like that can be used for things like stock manipulation. Thus the SCE frowns on those.

They don't have to say "we lost money on X project" in an interview. I'm not even sure they have to single out projects in their financial reports. And they didn't say "The Conduit was profitable!" or anything here, just that they're "pleased."

I thought a company could lie through its teeth in an interview. The only place they can't lie is the quarterly/annual/whatever investor reports. And even then, they don't have to report on profit/loss for each game individually

I'm not so sure you can LIE about those things in interviews (for the reasons LtNK mentioned), but I'm not 100% certain about that either.

They only are obligued to tell if the lost or win when they present finantial results (quaterly or annually), not in interviews and news articles. They can very well skip the question without any trouble. As long as you don't lie to investors and the IRS, you're fine.

Some companies can consider a win in sales of a product even if they lost money (they got no profit).

Any company that develops games cannot make the mistake that all their games are going to be the best sellers (they can brag to gamers but on on the investors or accounting managers) because they made the game. No, when there are many risk factors, you have to tell the investors or your bosses a much lower expectations in sales, even facing losses in some case scenarios (companies do two to four cases). The difference is that they have a level about how much loss is acceptable. Without these cases I don't think a developer would get a green light.

High Voltage Software knew this from the very begining. Even though they have experience in game developmen uder a tight budget and time frame on licenced titles. They knew they lack the expertise in original, propietary IPs and let alone in the FPS genre to say that The Conduit will become a classic. The company clearly considered the losses and made their expectations accordingly to determine a minimum level from which the game's performance in the market can be considered "good" or a total failure.

One of the reasons that many publishers rejected the idea of publishing the game was because they don't wasn to lose money on Wii games. these pucblishers have loss expectations on PS3 and/or XBox360 projects because they can rely on Wii quick cash-in shovelware games to recover some of that loss. SEGA understood these expectations and became the publisher.

The conduit was not a total failure. a "bomb" in sales like some may think. The fact that SEGA and HVS are both happy means that IF they didn't get a profit, the sales went beyond they moderate or high expectations (I imagine they were very very low for both).

Well if we go by VGChartz numbers, Mario Kart has sold about 990k in the same time that the Conduit sold 240k.  I'm sure The Conduit has a much higher percentage playing online, but it still seems like a stretch.

"High Voltage Software knew this from the very begining. Even though they have experience in game developmen uder a tight budget and time frame on licenced titles. They knew they lack the expertise in original, propietary IPs and let alone in the FPS genre to say that The Conduit will become a classic. The company clearly considered the losses and made their expectations accordingly to determine a minimum level from which the game's performance in the market can be considered "good" or a total failure.

One of the reasons that many publishers rejected the idea of publishing the game was because they don't wasn to lose money on Wii games. these pucblishers have loss expectations on PS3 and/or XBox360 projects because they can rely on Wii quick cash-in shovelware games to recover some of that loss. SEGA understood these expectations and became the publisher."

Talk about presumptive. And big cash whore developers like Ubisoft and Activision show that is not a true notion.

Hmm, good point. Just throwing pasta at the wall and seeing if its sticks.