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[Psychotext]

Talking of LBP... I was just in Asda buying some milk when I noticed that 75% of the front page of their instore magazine was taken up by Sackboy. Crazy.

 

[Tideas]

errrm - i might not be a massive business expert but if you factor in the Ad campaign etc do you REALLY want to start invoking the profit line?

i've NO IDEA what the bottom line is, but if you are going to start talking about something bombing if it fails to make a profit, then you open the PS3 as a hardware platform up to the "it's BIGGO BOMBA" attacks.

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

 

[Segata Sanshiro]

:lol You've been on a roll lately Segata.

edit: Why does your tag take me to a youtube clip of the Blackadder?

Because he, like me, was the Duke of Edinburgh and the Lord Warden of the Royal Privies.

 

[Dina]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

God where to begin...

There are other costs then wages alone.
There are other companies having a piece of the 60$ 'profit' pie.

 

[wolfmat]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

Quite some stuff missing there, like marketing costs, shipping costs, taxes, yadda yadda. Would be cool if it was that easy to calculate this.

 

[DCharlie]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

woooah there - i'm not a business major but hold your horses.

$60 a pop is RRP, that's going to break down into TOTAL REVENUE FOR ALL PARTIES CONCERNED - i'm ignoring retail overheads, pressings, etc. If you think sony get $60 returned per game then you are in for a huge unwelcome surprise.


70k per folk, okay - so thats 35k average per folk GBP? that's um pretty low for ex lionhead start up surely? but yeah, okay . 'And that's being generous with the salary"? WOAH there mister - this is the UK not the US that's NOWHERE NEAR generous.

then throw in start up costs (okay, they'll make other games.... eventually), dev kits, prototpying, advertising revenue , etc etc...

too many factors missing to call.

 

[Kujo]

Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

Well it's somewhat less than $50 per title, but they have shipped far more than 500k copies, I believe it's nearing 1 million shipped.

 

[DCharlie]

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

that's the revenue figure, not the profit.

not all of that is going back to sony.

also, $ values on a GBP project will possibly incur some FX losses too

(oh and some translation/localisation costs as well)

OH YEAH, and the recall costs - don't forget that.
weren't people claiming that 500k copies had to be destroyed?
500k * 60$ loss that would be!

Spoiler

except not really!

 

[gkryhewy]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

What a trainwreck of an analysis.

 

[fortified_concept]

Quite some stuff missing there, like marketing costs, shipping costs, taxes, yadda yadda. Would be cool if it was that easy to calculate this.

what marketing costs?

 

[acm2000]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

:lol

 

[Fafalada]

WOAH there mister - this is the UK not the US that's NOWHERE NEAR generous.

I don't know about other fields, but back in the day(PS2 days) I remember game-SEs in UK averaging 25k pounds, and given how little's changed in the industry in the rest of the world since then, I sincerely doubt UK alone suddenly started paying SEs much better, especially in this economy.
Adding traditionally lower salaries for other fields (eg. artists, testers, designers), 35k average for 30 folks may well be generous, even after factoring in something excessive for the lead brass.

And for the second part, outside for maybe the times when $ was bottoming out, US has easily held the highest game-field salary standards in the world, even compared to UK afaik. Granted, US game industry is primarily CA based, so that skews their averages, but that's besides the point.

 

[Staccat0]

What is a bomba? What is it in comparison to a bomb?

 

[Vangellis]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

Whoa... omg where to begin :lol

 

[wolfmat]

what marketing costs?

Haha I know what you're hinting at, but they had quite some presentations, videos for sites, magazine features, plain ads and we all heard of the TV stuff right in here.

 

[acm2000]

Whoa... omg where to begin :lol

just... dont :lol apparently rrp = 100% profit

 

[Forsete]

Woah, 1000 posts. Looks like quite a few of the usuals are worried its a success after all.

 

[spwolf]

that's the revenue figure, not the profit.

not all of that is going back to sony.

also, $ values on a GBP project will possibly incur some FX losses too

(oh and some translation/localisation costs as well)

OH YEAH, and the recall costs - don't forget that.
weren't people claiming that 500k copies had to be destroyed?
500k * 60$ loss that would be!

Spoiler

except not really!

exactly... but since it is 1st party costs, much bigger cut of the pie goes to the Sony... Actually quite likely that on average it is around $50 (in europe it is more expensive)...

game probably broke even this month, and Sony will make more money on it than Konami on MGS4 which had huge production costs...

Again, it is probably most money sony made on an game so far... Unless people think it will stop selling at 500k

 

[Oliver.S]

Where on earth have all these LBP haters come from ?, they weren't here before the game was released ?, they weren't here during the beta ?, but now there here becuase the the game hasn't sold 10million copies in a month <rolleyes>, this whole thread is just a blatant excuse for xbots and the like to jump in and try and put down a game that has been critically acclaimed.

People coming out with pathetic statements like "the reason I think the game is a failure is becuase of the floaty controls" <sigh>, or "oh the game has failed becuase it doesn't fit into causal or hardcore gaming", wtf are you people talking about seriously ?, The game has not failed, it just hasn't sold as well as many internet nerds expected it to of, that doesn't make the game a failure, but rather just an excuse for sad xbox fanboy's to try to rub sand in peoples eyes because it some how makes them feel better putting down a game that many Sony ps3 users enjoy playing,

God knows why they do this, I can only imagine they believe by doing this it somehow makes them feel better about their allegiance to Microsoft or some weird psychological shit along those lines, I really don't know tbh, why are you people so desperate to prove that game is a failure before it's barely even had a chance to run ?

I have all 3 consoles in my home and LBP was my second most wanted game of the year. But I agree with you on one point: I said, I don't like the controls of the game but in my opinion, this issue is not the reason behind a (possible) failure on the market.

 

[Rocksteady33]

exactly... but since it is 1st party costs, much bigger cut of the pie goes to the Sony... Actually quite likely that on average it is around $50 (in europe it is more expensive)...

game probably broke even this month, and Sony will make more money on it than Konami on MGS4 which had huge production costs...

Again, it is probably most money sony made on an game so far... Unless people think it will stop selling at 500k

(neutral) spwolf
If this poster agrees with you, you're doing something very wrong.
(Today, 09:58 AM)

 

[Phife Dawg]

Well it seems like we're the ones arguing about it

Maybe we should ask Sony then..or moreover, perhaps, even MM.

By all means, consider it a failure if you wish. I just think it's a very simplistic way of looking at things - that anything less than achieving the most optimistic of expectations (be they publisher/player/fanboy/whatever) is 'failure'. We'll have to agree to disagree on that.

Why simplistic? The publisher is the one financially responsible for this product, if it fails his expectations, how can it not be a failure? Just because he had very ambitious expectations? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense but whatever. And I don't know why MM would have a say in this since they're the developer and not the publisher and were looking for someone to pay for their project.

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

On top of what the others already mentioned, LBP was unveiled roughly a year and a half ago. Judging by its reveal it had been in development at that time for quite some, because iirc they demoed it at GDC '07, complete with level creation and ad-hoc multiplayer of that same level. Oh and they announced it to be released at the end of '07 too. That would've been one hell of a short development cycle if they'd have just started coding it.

After a bit of google search MM said they started in January of '06, so almost 3 years from now.

 

[GameGamer]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

PLEASE go into journalism.

You will have a long career there.

 

[gkryhewy]

Woah, 1000 posts. Looks like quite a few of the usuals are worried its a success after all.

And two of them are you repeating this silliness.

 

[Spiegel]

On top of what the others already mentioned, LBP was unveiled roughly a year and a half ago. Judging by its reveal it had been in development at that time for quite some, because iirc they demoed it at GDC '07, complete with level creation and ad-hoc multiplayer of that same level. Oh and they announced it to be released at the end of '07 too. That would've been one hell of a short development cycle if they'd have just started coding it.

After a bit of google search MM said they started in January of '06, so almost 3 years from now.

The game was going to be released in early 08

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6167059.html

 

[DCharlie]

I don't know about other fields, but back in the day(PS2 days) I remember game-SEs in UK averaging 25k pounds, and given how little's changed in the industry in the rest of the world since then, I sincerely doubt UK alone suddenly started paying SEs much better, especially in this economy.
Adding traditionally lower salaries for other fields (eg. artists, testers, designers), 35k average for 30 folks may well be generous, even after factoring in something excessive for the lead brass.

And for the second part, outside for maybe the times when $ was bottoming out, US has easily held the highest game-field salary standards in the world, even compared to UK afaik. Granted, US game industry is primarily CA based, so that skews their averages, but that's besides the point.

well, that would go against my experience, but things may have contracted since back in the day.

I was gunning for two gaming posts back in the day not to far from 25k pounds (names withheld , both Liverpool based (doesn't take a genius... ended up a corporate mfér as you know) around 97 , the people i know who went into the gaming industry at the time started on around that figure easily and long since out stripped that level (but they were all pretty damned talented). Given the core of MM is made up of Lionhead offsprings and is heavily sponsored, i'd expect salaries (especially in the Chertsey/Guildford area) to be above 25k gbp for a coder.

Regardless of Salary though, the rest is still on note. $60 per game is the revenue per game generated, not the profit back to Sony and the fact that Sony is self publishing does not remove the retail overhead, so the figure is still way out.

That's not to say it hasn't made a profit, hell it might have, but a project is rarely rated on "did we make a profit or not?" as a simple binary trigger for success.

 

[[Nintex]]

Where on earth have all these LBP haters come from ?, they weren't here before the game was released ?, they weren't here during the beta ?, but now there here becuase the the game hasn't sold 10million copies in a month <rolleyes>, this whole thread is just a blatant excuse for xbots and the like to jump in and try and put down a game that has been critically acclaimed.

People coming out with pathetic statements like "the reason I think the game is a failure is becuase of the floaty controls" <sigh>, or "oh the game has failed becuase it doesn't fit into causal or hardcore gaming", wtf are you people talking about seriously ?, The game has not failed, it just hasn't sold as well as many internet nerds expected it to of, that doesn't make the game a failure, but rather just an excuse for sad xbox fanboy's to try to rub sand in peoples eyes because it some how makes them feel better putting down a game that many Sony ps3 users enjoy playing,

God knows why they do this, I can only imagine they believe by doing this it somehow makes them feel better about their allegiance to Microsoft or some weird psychological shit along those lines, I really don't know tbh, why are you people so desperate to prove that game is a failure before it's barely even had a chance to run ?

LBP 'haters' or how you call them, tried to argue with the SDF about this game. But every time someone dared to enter a thread and say something like: "You know, maybe this level isn't all that great", "the jumping looks kinda odd" or "this advertising is rather poor" they would be covered in shit and shot on sight. So now that it isn't the proclaimed 10/10!!! BEST GAME EVAR(you'd think that fans on all sides would learn something from Zelda TP, Halo 3 and GTAIV) and PS3 fanatics moved on to the next year of PS3 they finally have a chance to say: "We told you so" and some of them just aren't that subtle in delivering the message.

 

[kaching]

but a project is rarely rated on "did we make a profit or not?" as a simple binary trigger for success.

Shame, since we seem to be able to evaluate failure based on a pretty binary trigger, according to the OP.

 

[spwolf]

Why simplistic? The publisher is the one financially responsible for this product, if it fails his expectations, how can it not be a failure? Just because he had very ambitious expectations? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense but whatever. And I don't know why MM would have a say in this since they're the developer and not the publisher and were looking for someone to pay for their project.


On top of what the others already mentioned, LBP was unveiled roughly a year and a half ago. Judging by its reveal it had been in development at that time for quite some, because iirc they demoed it at GDC '07, complete with level creation and ad-hoc multiplayer of that same level. Oh and they announced it to be released at the end of '07 too. That would've been one hell of a short development cycle if they'd have just started coding it.

After a bit of google search MM said they started in January of '06, so almost 3 years from now.

if 500k sales in not good enough for 25 people team, then no games would be produced anymore

Besides, MM is 1st party developer, and Sony is publisher... so indeed most of the revenues are going to Sony, including licensing fees... It is not like some 3rd party devs who have share of the pie cut by 3rd party publishers and sony and are at the end left with some 20$ per game, or less.

And of course, I am sure MM will get nice bonuses for the sucess of the game...

 

[DCharlie]

Shame, since we seem to be able to evaluate failure based on a pretty binary trigger, according to the OP.

indeed - way too early to be shouting bomba, and the fact that a community and possibly a long overdue Sony mascot has spawned out of the project are definitely worth something.

I think some fanboys were overly low with predictions and some were overly high, but the game is doing well so far. Though i think those claiming the game was a system seller were off mark (unless the next moth shows a spike)

if 500k sales in not good enough for 25 people team, then no games would be produced anymore

if we take this as the bench mark , then Yugiho is the most successful game ever

Not really into getting into it, but this is all about expectation and delivery. As far as i'm concerned, the game has exceeded what i expected - in terms of gameplay and experience as well as sales but relative success for LBP should be more pronounced than "well , there was only 25 of them so 500k should be good!" - the project has been way more high profile than just "selling 500k" can be considered a massive success (as i said previous, the LBP thread where everyone predicted the sales would be a good thread to dig up)

 

[Phife Dawg]

The game was going to be released in early 08

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6167059.html

The article here says end of '07 according to Harrison. It's by Kotaku though :lol .

Doesn't matter anyway, they started in January '06.

if 500k sales in not good enough for 25 people team, then no games would be produced anymore

Besides, MM is 1st party developer, and Sony is publisher... so indeed most of the revenues are going to Sony, including licensing fees... It is not like some 3rd party devs who have share of the pie cut by 3rd party publishers and sony and are at the end left with some 20$ per game, or less.

And of course, I am sure MM will get nice bonuses for the sucess of the game...

I never claimed the game wouldn't make a profit or anything like that.

 

[Tideas]

that's the revenue figure, not the profit.

not all of that is going back to sony.

also, $ values on a GBP project will possibly incur some FX losses too

(oh and some translation/localisation costs as well)

OH YEAH, and the recall costs - don't forget that.
weren't people claiming that 500k copies had to be destroyed?
500k * 60$ loss that would be!

Spoiler

except not really!

even if you look at it from that perspective, let say for every game sold to the retailers, Sony makes back $25 out of say, $50 that they charge the retailers.

$25 * 500k = $12.5mil.

you can say one or another, but once a game passes a precipitous point, all game sold to retailers are pure profit.

The precipitous point just depends on how long the game has been in development and how many people were hired for said game.

 

[wolfmat]

even if you look at it from that perspective, let say for every game sold to the retailers, Sony makes back $25 out of say, $50 that they charge the retailers.

$25 * 500k = $12.5mil.

you can say one or another, but once a game passes a precipitous point, all game sold to retailers are pure profit.

The precipitous point just depends on how long the game has been in development and how many people were hired for said game.

This is a rather limited view of costs.

For example, you could use UE3. The licensing costs alone bump up the pricepoint of your game considerably.

Or you use some famous person in your marketing campaign. Plop money down the drain.

And to be accurate, you have to FIRST add up ALL costs Sony has in the sales period, then subtract ALL profits from all titles, then assign a percentage value devised by sales numbers that tells you what part of the profit actually is LBP's. Then you end up with a reasonable number. Your guessing game ends at a random number.

Edit: Please excuse the fuzzy terminology, I'm not a native speaker.

 

[DCharlie]

$25 * 500k = $12.5mil.

minus :

business start up/basic admin running costs (unknown)
Advertising costs (unknown)
Salary (CONTENDED!) GBP 25k ($37k) * 25 for 1.5 years (contended?) = 1.38m
dev kits / development overheads (unknown)
premisis rental (unknown)
etc etc etc etc....

and also , we are working on $25 per game to Sony - times might have changed, but that seems a touch high? Maybe i'm old and outdated on that front.

Let me phrase it a different way - do you think LBP is a project that cost under $2m to develop/market/etc?

 

[gofreak]

Why simplistic? The publisher is the one financially responsible for this product, if it fails his expectations, how can it not be a failure? Just because he had very ambitious expectations? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense but whatever.

Sure it does. You're viewing it as a two-way binary switch. Either success if it matches x or failure if it doesn't. Maybe it's an issue of semantics/language here, but it could fail to meet ambitious targets set by a publisher and still, by the publisher's reckoning, have done alright/good/great, and not be a failure in the broader general sense.

I doubt Sony considers LBP a failure at all. It's probably one of their more successful games on PS3 to date. How many of their PS3 games have sold as well in a similar timeframe? Not that many, I would guess (at least not many that benefitted from being launch titles).

We could argue the toss on this all day. You're going to consider it a failure no matter how it does, as long as it doesn't match some unspecified 'high' Sony expectation, and I'm gonna say that doesn't really seem fitting when the game is doing well in absolute terms.

 

[Redd]

Bomba or not LBP is still a solid game imo. I tried to get my sister into but she had difficulty controlling her sackboy and gave up after an hour. She did have fun making her character though and she had this smile on her face the whole time. There should be a way where you can fix how Sackboy moves and jumps and I'm sure sure would love the game.

 

[Farnack]

Man, I didn't want to post in this thread, but I'll just voice my agreement.

4 days of sales.

And the fact that the release date was confusing. I was set to buy LBP day one with a preorder set in, but I never took the chance to goto Futureshop just to see the game isn't there yet due to weird shipping times. People definitely didn't know when to buy it.

October NPD doesn't matter for crap for the late game releases.

This thread is a joke.

 

[wolfmat]

Bomba or not LBP is still a solid game imo. I tried to get my sister into but she had difficulty controlling her sackboy and gave up after an hour. She did have fun making her character though and she had this smile on her face the whole time. There should be a way where you can fix how Sackboy moves and jumps and I'm sure sure would love the game.

My "sister" also had this "smile" on her "face" when I "introduced" her to the "Sackboy" after "booting".

Ah god that was awful.

 

[Redd]

My "sister" also had this "smile" on her "face" when I "introduced" her to the "Sackboy" after "booting".

Ah god that was awful.

She tried her damndest making the Sackgirl look exactly like her.:lol She kept asking me how to put stuff on its face and fixing the hair. It was pretty cool, she just had trouble actually playing the game.

 

[clashfan]

Let me phrase it a different way - do you think LBP is a project that cost under $2m to develop/market/etc?

LBP was made by saints who took no money.

 

[freddy]

I tried to get my sister into but she had difficulty controlling her sackboy and gave up after an hour. She did have fun making her character though and she had this smile on her face the whole time. There should be a way where you can fix how Sackboy moves and jumps and I'm sure sure would love the game.

This post says it all really. The game tried hard but its just not the huge saviour that Sony and others made it out to be.

 

[Cheech]

October NPD doesn't matter for crap for the late game releases.

This thread is a joke.

Sorry, but Fallout on the 360 sold ~double what this title did in that same frame of time. It also got crushed by Fable, and Gears 2 will sell many times over what LBP will.

Regardless of what you perceive the relative quality of those titles to be, LBP should have sold more as Sony's self-described "big gun" for the holiday. It HAD to, otherwise what else is going to move consoles?

The real crime here, as others have mentioned, is Sony's woeful under-advertising of the PS3 in general as of late. Perhaps they are simply running out of money to mount a huge marketing campaign?

 

[jrricky]

Game sells 300k. At $60 a pop, that's $18 million.

Game took about a year and a half to develope. Staff of 30 folks. 70k average per folks. $2.1 million.

And that's being generous with the salary, and how much the game sold. Sony has probably shipped about 500k of these bad boys worldwide.

500k sold to retailers * $50 = $25 million.

So yeah, it made a profit.

even if you look at it from that perspective, let say for every game sold to the retailers, Sony makes back $25 out of say, $50 that they charge the retailers.

$25 * 500k = $12.5mil.

you can say one or another, but once a game passes a precipitous point, all game sold to retailers are pure profit.

The precipitous point just depends on how long the game has been in development and how many people were hired for said game.

HOLY SHIT.:lol :lol

 

[Farnack]

Sorry, but Fallout on the 360 sold ~double what this title did in that same frame of time. It also got crushed by Fable, and Gears 2 will sell many times over what LBP will.

Regardless of what you perceive the relative quality of those titles to be, LBP should have sold more as Sony's self-described "big gun" for the holiday. It HAD to, otherwise what else is going to move consoles?

The real crime here, as others have mentioned, is Sony's woeful under-advertising of the PS3 in general as of late. Perhaps they are simply running out of money to mount a huge marketing campaign?

You read what I said? Did Fallout 3 have a last minute release date push back?

No. None of that.

Fallout 3 released when it dated. LBP was delayed for an unknown amount of time to fix that music.

 

[Tideas]

This is a rather limited view of costs.

For example, you could use UE3. The licensing costs alone bump up the pricepoint of your game considerably.

Or you use some famous person in your marketing campaign. Plop money down the drain.

And to be accurate, you have to FIRST add up ALL costs Sony has in the sales period, then subtract ALL profits from all titles, then assign a percentage value devised by sales numbers that tells you what part of the profit actually is LBP's. Then you end up with a reasonable number. Your guessing game ends at a random number.

Edit: Please excuse the fuzzy terminology, I'm not a native speaker.

but we're not talking about a UE3 game. We're talking about LBP. The engine was made in-house. Therefore, the cost was just supplies and salaries.

I mean, think of this way, all the cost to make the game is up-front cost. Salaries. Supplies. Sony tells MM. Okay, you got $10 million to make this game. MM takes that money and use it to pay the salaries and building cost.

Game comes out. Let's say Sony sells each copies to stores for $50 per disc. Great. Let's say, per disc, the costs of everything else is $10 (printing, shipping, etc). Okay, that's $40.

So say you sell 500k copies. That's $20 million in revenue. Say they spend $20 million in ads. Now say, after the first round of selling to retailers 500k, the 2nd round they sell just 300k. That's $12 million in revenue.

From that point on, every disc they sell to retailers is pure profit. Once the game is complete, the only thing that takes away from the revenue per disc is the pressing, printing, shipping, and overhead of managing all that. This is where mass-scale economy comes in.

A little generalized, but like I said. From a profit point of view, it's not a bomba as many of you detractors tend to make it out to be.

 

[jrricky]

but we're not talking about a UE3 game. We're talking about LBP. The engine was made in-house. Therefore, the cost was just supplies and salaries.

I mean, think of this way, all the cost to make the game is up-front cost. Salaries. Supplies. Sony tells MM. Okay, you got $10 million to make this game. MM takes that money and use it to pay the salaries and building cost.

Game comes out. Let's say Sony sells each copies to stores for $50 per disc. Great. Let's say, per disc, the costs of everything else is $10 (printing, shipping, etc). Okay, that's $40.

So say you sell 500k copies. That's $20 million in revenue. Say they spend $20 million in ads. Now say, after the first round of selling to retailers 500k, the 2nd round they sell just 300k. That's $12 million in revenue.

From that point on, every disc they sell to retailers is pure profit. Once the game is complete, the only thing that takes away from the revenue per disc is the pressing, printing, shipping, and overhead of managing all that. This is where mass-scale economy comes in.

A little generalized, but like I said. From a profit point of view, it's not a bomba as many of you detractors tend to make it out to be.

Oh wow. 90 % of games make profit....

 

[DCharlie]

A little generalized, but like I said. From a profit point of view, it's not a bomba as many of you detractors tend to make it out to be.

you are missing so many points and making so many jumps to get to your profitability figures though that it's hard to not take issue.

you are confusing revenue with profit too, and you are missing big chunks out of the pie such as Retails cut (amongst other things)

 

[DangerStepp]

I haven't bought it yet, too many other games? :S

What he said.

I asked for it on my Christmas list. My prediction: I'll play with it a few times and that'll be it, because creating stuff doesn't sound very appealing

I hope to be proven wrong.

 

[freddy]

Tideas isn't making a real good fist of the argument but anyone who thinks LBP wont turn a profit is just as delusional as those who thought it was going to rival Wii Fit and Mario Kart.

 

[wolfmat]

but we're not talking about a UE3 game. We're talking about LBP. The engine was made in-house. Therefore, the cost was just supplies and salaries.

I mean, think of this way, all the cost to make the game is up-front cost. Salaries. Supplies. Sony tells MM. Okay, you got $10 million to make this game. MM takes that money and use it to pay the salaries and building cost.

Game comes out. Let's say Sony sells each copies to stores for $50 per disc. Great. Let's say, per disc, the costs of everything else is $10 (printing, shipping, etc). Okay, that's $40.

So say you sell 500k copies. That's $20 million in revenue. Say they spend $20 million in ads. Now say, after the first round of selling to retailers 500k, the 2nd round they sell just 300k. That's $12 million in revenue.

From that point on, every disc they sell to retailers is pure profit. Once the game is complete, the only thing that takes away from the revenue per disc is the pressing, printing, shipping, and overhead of managing all that. This is where mass-scale economy comes in.

A little generalized, but like I said. From a profit point of view, it's not a bomba as many of you detractors tend to make it out to be.

Noone's debating that there's a break-even point in sales numbers. It's just that you won't find it out that easily. Sony has a lot more costs than just the costs of getting their games on shelves.
I guess they're split up into divisions and each one of them has to handle themselves, but still, the games division has higher costs than the sum of all games costs.
The games division only makes money with those games though, so each game has to make up for more costs than it individually generates. That's why you calculate this stuff backwards, usually. Calculating it progressively only brings you to an estimate, and if you guess the numbers for this calculation, god knows where you end up. That's my point.

And whether or not this game is a bomba at all we cannot say at this point, I find. This is where the NPD numbers come in, after a reasonable time period the game has spent on shelves. I don't think we're at that point yet.

 

[rollingstart]

wait.... aren't you pimping that new SE game elsewhere?

didn't you say it was GOTS at TGS08?

I'm hardly the Sony defender, but you are smoking hot rocks if LBP is a shitty product.

either that or you only play nuggest of gold shat out of the game gods themselves

Some have high standards, some have low, then there are those who shower in poo hoping to get cleaned off by Mr Pib shower in due time. Or really just people who try to be 'edgy' and 'hip' by hating on something popular.