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Author Topic: Alien Breed 2005 - what do you think?  (Read 2888 times)

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Offline Lando

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Re: Alien Breed 2005 - what do you think?
« on: November 25, 2004, 07:35:42 PM »
There is absolutely zero chance of Team 17 or any other of the bigger games companies producing anything for AmigaOS until the user base is in the millions.  Publisher's wouldn't touch it.  

Even GameCube, with something like 17 million consoles sold worldwide, has a hard time finding publishers willing to touch it.  A platform with a user base 17,000 times smaller has no chance.

The costs in creating a game these days are astronomical.  Of the £40 price that a game sells for in the shops, the developer sees maybe £4 (Those developers who are also publishers, such as Codemasters, see more, around £7 or £8).

So, if the port of a game to a particular platform takes 3 coders and one artist a year, at a salary of £35k each, they need to sell £140,000 / £4 = 35,000 copies just to cover the  salaries.  Add to that overheads, and you're looking at 50,000 copies just to break even.  A decent-selling game might sell to 1-2% of owners (most sell less, and a few sell much more, such as the GTA series, but these are very rare).

So you're looking at an installed base of 3-5 million before a platform is even worth looking at from a break-even point of view.  And this is only for a port.  For an original, Amiga-only title, the costs would be 3 or 4 times that.

Just trying to inject a little reality...