Namco: 500,000 PS3 games required for profit

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500k units. Thats fucking nuts. I've been out of the game industry for a long time now, but last i remember 100,000 units was considered a best seller.

This was weird but yesterday a marketing research company called me to ask about the kind of benefits third party developers receive from console makers in order to develop on thier system. From what i remember, the bigger companies are always well taken care of in hopes of getting exclusivity of major titles. Lets just conservatively say it takes 100k units sold to make a hit on ps3...thats still a huge task for the smaller developers. Im guessing that over the next year, the ps3 consumer will be pretty "graphics" driven in order to show off their hardware...3rd party developers may not have the resources to develop games that look good enough to compete with larger companies.

If i was a developer, i would make games for xbox360. My imagination would run wild for the wii but i would wait to see how well it sells (which is looking good enough already). Although graphics aren't everything, developers do want to show off. Unfortunately, Ps3 would definitely be a wait and see how well it sells type of thing.
 
well, this is coming from namco's mouth, so lets be nice and say this is the average cost for namco to make ps3 games. The only namco game that might sell this well has been their fighting games...but not everyone buys fighting games. Namco has to ask themselves if all the titles they put out can make that 500k number. This is an obvious no and because of that i think we may see cancelled or pushed back games. But now you have to look further and ask yourself how many systems have to be sold in order for your next tekken to turn a profit.
 
I don't see 500k as being a huge obstacle. Bandai-Namco is popular in Japan... so I'd think they could sell 500k+. But the 8.6 million in cost to develop new PS3 products... that seems high for some reason.

Btw, what goes into the cost of developing a game? I mean if you have everything there like computers, personnel, licenses, then all you pay for is a broken computer, pencils, and wages, right?
 
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