505: Profit is more important than sales

505 Games has attributed its past successes to turning profit quickly rather than concentrating on high sales figures.

The publisher revealed in an interview with MCV that it has never been unafraid of projects that other firms have walked away from, and sees these more as opportunities.

Commercial director Ralph Pitt-Stanley said: From day one we’ve never been afraid of projects that may seem a little different at first, but then you start seeing the code and, more importantly, the sell through, and they start making sense.

Those are our roots: making good opportunities from projects that other companies have maybe walked away from.”

Head of global brand Tim Woodley added: We always come back to the same internal metric: does a game make the money it needs to in order to help us continue to grow? And given that we don’t have 1,000 people worldwide – we barely have 100 people – we don’t need 2m or even 1m units to do good money.

So maybe some other publishers might look at our sales numbers and think, ‘Hmmm, not sure about that’, but not everyone’s doing the deals we’re doing and not everyone can turn a profit as quickly as we do.”

The publisher saw success with Naughty Bear last year despite mixed reviews, and more recently released Grease on Wii and DS.

To read the full interview click here.