UPDATED: EEDAR retracts figures – now claims that 20% of titles that make it to retail make a profit
California based research company Electronic Entertainment Design and Research has claimed that only four per cent of titles that make it to market go on to make a profit.
Speaking to Forbes Geoffrey Zatkin, president of the 20-man sales data firm, divulged a number of interesting facts relating to a study recently completed for Ubisoft regarding possible upcoming title FutureNot.
He added that around 60 per cent of a game’s budget is spent reworking or redesigning a game, as well as stating that the average sales total for an Xbox 360 game is around 216,000 units – with the middle 50 per cent of published console titles selling between 75,000 and 250,000 units.
The average PS3 title, in contrast, sells a very specific 192,256 copies, meaning any title releasing on both Sony’s and Microsoft’s platform can expect to sell 408,336 units on average.
Implementing a co-op mode in a given title is likely to boost sales by 12,400, whilst multiplayer features could see a sales hike of 25,000 copies. As this represents an addition revenue stream of around $1 million, EEDAR states that providing the total cost for these modes is no more than $300,000, it would be well worth doing.
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Also highlighted is the fact that ongoing DLC releases help keep titles out of the second-hand areas of retail – and the fewer titles available second hand the better sales of new copies are likely to be.
UPDATE: Edge Online has published an updated statement from EEDAR that reads:
"This was just a big mistake. What Geoffrey said was that only 20 per cent of games that start production will end up with a finished product. And of that percentage of finished games, 20 per cent will make a profit.”
"This means that 4 per cent of all games which start production will eventually make a profit, but a far-more-likely 20 per cent of finished products will see profitable returns."
Comments
Complete rubbish
If this were true, there would be no small publishers (who on average would need to produce over 20 games before making a profitable one if these stats are correct) and no self-publishing developers at all. Anyone who has looked at the financials of the larger publishers will know this is certainly not true of them. There would simply not be a games industry if this were true. Maybe only 4% of games produce meaningful levels of overages for third party developers. Maybe.
i can believe it
sorry for this old chestnt again, but lets say most supermakets selling new titles just for 1 week at below cost price then thousands would not make a penny,
we pretty much make £3 per new title selling for £42.99
which still looks over prices compared to supermarkets, but after VAT etc its pretty acurate, doesnt mean the publishers are not making the money, its the retailer lowering the price to the customer
Re: i can believe it
You've completely missed the point. The price at retail has negligible impact on the budget of a game. Supermarket or any other retailer's pricing impacts upon their own retail margin, not publisher margin. Published profitability is largely about shipped and sold through volume less costs.
Re: Re: i can believe it
thats sounds about right considering the average profit a game of £20 make is about £1 and at £30 its about £3.
and when you look into it more if you take a cross section or all games published I bet about 3 third of them u've never heard of.
and the whole bull**** about publisher not making a profit is a bit bull to be honest its the developers falling apart at the moment not the publisher those robbing bleeps are raking it in because they are just playing it safe
another down side to this is more companies producing shovelware start to come about and the PS2 and Wii at this moment in time are prime examples of this
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