Not shocking considering they're including the expense of buying an entire company.

Though the initial development cost is ridiculous, I mean gta4 cost 100 million to make!

WHAT THE HOLY HELL?!

This is SHOCKING

Boy, was that unexpected. 0_o

I don't think it's anything for them to worry about though, they'll make their money back guaranteed.

I don't think things are just smooth sailing from here on out. Sales for music games are down this year. They are no longer getting many sales from the higher-priced peripheral bundles, which even with a surprisingly low margin, are probably higher margin than the standalone games.

And they don't have the market to themselves. They are competing with Guitar Hero, and GH is winning, which is going to automatically mean a lower margin business. They are in the old lower costs vs. higher differentiation problem. As in, they can either make cut rate instruments and ditch the master tracks, and sell for cheap, or they can go out and buy the biggest content possible like The Beatles to stand out from GH at the same price. They may make some money still, depending on where annual sales level out, but the point where I would expect this to be a high margin business is when they had the only full band game on the market, with just 50 some odd songs, for almost $200. Not when they have 80 songs, or 40 ultra-expensive songs like the Beatles, for $60.

100 million? Lol what did they do, give every developer a solid gold peripheral set?

it's possible this is fake. There's a trick movie studios use, they always cook the books such that no movie is profitable if they get sued. In other words, even the most profitable movie, can be spun to have no net profit by the studio with creative accounting.

I am with you.  There is absolutely no way that it took $100 million to develop RB1.  No WAY!!  Either they cooked the books or somethings off here.  On a side note, I don't think they should add the price of the company on here.  

I really hate how certain people think they know about economics when they don't. Not you btw OP, the person who wrote the article you linked to.

Without looking at the whole article I can't tell if they made any other mistakes, but assuming they didn't, the actual profit made is $60 million, not negative 90 million.

You cannot say that they spent $150 million buying the company, and thus minus that from the revenue. Because they now own a company that they didn't before. they could resell it, thus it does not actually count as a loss of money because their net wealth doesn't change

RB franchise profitable confirmed

/Thread

I read somewhere that it cost US$25,000 to get the license for a master track and US$12,000 to cover it. Downloadable songs must be another story because the profits should be split between music and videogame companies for every purchase.

With these numbers the OP seems fake to me, it's way off.

Another thing, they paid Harmonix 150million!!!??? WTF?? Why would they pay more than the cost of developing the game? Of course there must be premiums for success, but 150million seems way too much. Lego RB is the next game in the series and the family would be:

- Rock Band
- Rock Band 2
- Rock Band Unplugged (PSP)
- Beatles Rock Band
- Ipod Touch/Iphone Rock Band
- Lego Rock Band

And I'm not going to count all the Track Packs (there have been several like AC/DC, country and many more)

And there's also a huge number of DLC songs.

My point is that the series must be profitable by now. I love how Rock Band plays and I like it way over Guitar Hero because of the design (it seems more elegant an polished on Rock Band) but I won't argue with anyone if that person says that GH is better, they're basically the same but for drums the RB seems way better to me, bass/guitar is basically the same on both fronts.