$14 million is still completely unreasonable for a video game. The only games that should come close are seminal titles funded by a hardware manufacturer (Mario and the like). Depending on how conservative you are with your accounting (even taking into account rent, HR, IT and other auxiliary costs) $10 million is A LOT, and a great console game can be produced for half that. PC games shouldn't come anywhere near that if run properly (they have lower dev costs). Of course, games like WarCraft III can get away with it.
Does anybody have actual sales data for the Ultima series? That would be some great info to have. Hugh -----Original Message----- From: Edward Franks [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 11:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SWCollect] Greetings On Saturday, October 5, 2002, at 01:10 PM, C.E. Forman wrote: [Snip] > That's the worst part of it. They decrease their costs but don't pass > any > savings on to us. (Same way movie theaters piss me off by showing 10 > commercials before a flick while ticket prices remain constant.) I imagine their development costs have sky-rocketed to the point that they are just breaking even or making a small increase in profit. An example: One of the reasons Origin was sold to EA is that the price to create an Ultima shot up tremendously, but the total sales of each Ultima had remained flat since Ultima III. In the decade since that happened the situation has gotten far worse. The then unimaginable $14 million costs of Wing Commander III look fairly reasonable these days. -- Edward Franks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
