- tha man
- |
- Noble Legendary Member
Hey so I know a lot of you guys are tired of thread about fanboys yelling and saying 60 bucks is worthy of the price because of the campaign and firefight. But please let me explain where your 60 bucks go to:
Breakdown for a 500,000 selling game:
$12- Retailer Cut
$12-Microsoft Licensing and Manufacturing
$7- Marketing
$20- Development Costs
$9- Publisher Overhead
Total=$60
Retailers Cut: So when you buy a game at let's say Best Buy Basically Best Buy will be making $12 since a game at its wholesale price is 48 buckeroos. Sometimes, retailers will also gain a two dollar allowance for advertising in stores. Have you ever seen a best buy catalog that comes with the Sunday paper and the HDTVs come photoshopped with a screenshot of Madden 2010 or Halo 3. ODST, Reach, etc.? Yeh, Best Buy gets Money off of that aswell.
Manufacturing and Licensing: Now Microsoft needs to get payed and they do that by implementing a royalty fee which basically translates to: "paying for the privilege to implement the game onto the Xbox 360 console". So what about the disc and manufacturing?
70 cents for a disc + 15 cents for those cool green cases + 15 cents for those packaging materials( including the satanic 3 security stickers that are hard to get off sometimes) = $1
Marketing: Ever noticed on bus stops and magazines a video game is advertised? Well basically in order to sell, you need hypes and things that will tease the buyer into buying it. so basically the "average spend in the industry toward marketing is around 14-15%"(Michael Patcher) so when you calculate that, it's basically $7 sometimes $5 if you include vendor allowances.
Development Costs/Publisher Costs: When you say that " MICro$oft R Cheap skates", smack yourself with a bat because that's TOTAL BS.
Lets take the Halo series for example: You see the publisher has to pay for the development of the game and what you don't know that a typical game for the Xbox 360 costs around 10 MILLION DOLLARS in development costs. So for every disc bought Microsoft is basically putting $10 down from each copy of the game towards the development costs. (Bungie needs to get paid to fellas).
So lets say the game ends up selling only 500,000 discs of the game. Microsoft is going to plan, for budgetary purposes, that the cost of R&D is $20.
So lastly the $9 will go to paying salaries and paying the rent at the Publisher's department so it is crucial to sell games and make them sell well.
Thanks to:
Official Xbox Magazine for the explanation. ( issue #77, December 2007)