1 million sales target eh ? so for tecmo koei that likely implies profitable as well, like say a 100% return on investment. 35 million in revenue (taking away retail and manufacturing costs) then ... minus what I'm guessing was a 2 year development cycle with a staff of roughly 50 people, japanese salary is lower the american salary for game development, perhaps 50,000 a year for each staffer, that implies 100K multiplied by 50 which would end up with a 5 million $ development budget and I'd wager 2-3 million spent promoting the game ... maybe even an extra million spent because it was ported from ps3 to 360. So let's call it at a 10 million dollar total budget.
So yeah I could see 1 million being an internal goal for huge profitability , especially when the enhanced wii U version comes out 6 months from now
. Really though, if they could even sell 300,000 worldwide across both platforms they'd probably be breaking even on this game. None of the dead or alives were really high budget titles but I imagine doa4 sold well over a million since release and it was a much smaller user base then. Even doa3 sold over a million. I seem to recall that doa ultimate did NOT sell to that level but none of them compare to the success of DOA2's non ultimate versions- the original US dreamcast port, the later limited japanese edition as well as the near launch japan ps2 version and finally the US release of DOA2 hardcore. It must have sold north of 3 million copies if you add all of those up.