Hmm... I heard that you could earn between $10,000 - $50,000 for a "small" game like a really advance and good tetris or a great chess game. I have only earn''t $200 for a promo-game

/MindWipe

"If it doesn''t fit, force it; if it breaks, it needed replacement anyway."

if you planned it out properly, you could make a really advanced Tetris pretty comfortable with probably two people.

in other words, max. $25,000 bucks per person for a clone? If this small team makes four clones a year, they''re making six figures...

Since I am mainly responsible for coming up with the investment strategy for our game, I may be able to shed some light here. Disney Interactive recently approached a company here in town asking them to propose a solution for a large MMORPG style game. The proposal went something like this:

Demo in 6 months, final game in 9 languages in 18 months, costs somewhere south of $2 million fronted by Disney, and 15% royalties off sales after the $2 million had been paid back to Disney. This along with almost 300 pages of context was included in the RFP.

Unfortunately publishers can make a deal like this and then turn around and inspect your entire company''s financials, etc., etc. The company here in town did not get awarded the contract because their revenue was not enough in Disney''s eyes to convince them the company would survive the project.

This being an example of what can happen may help to shed some light on the attitude that publishers can and do bring to the table. Whether or not the company here in town would have made money on the deal or not is an entirely different issue as DavidRM has said. To me, when approaching these types of contracts, your money can be made on the development side if your processes and development methodologies are in place and followed. This reduces the cost of development work and in turn increases profits. As always in contracts with any publisher, scope management is of utmost importance to make any money during development.

Who knows, given a contract like this, maybe it will be a hit and the royalties will come in. Given the above numbers your game would have to sell 44,445 copies @ $45.00ea to make you your first dollar which is roughly 63% as successful as the average game on the market today.(70,000 copies) It can be done though at $45 per and an average selling game the development studio would only make $172,500 in royalties assuming the price of the product remained $45 while on the shelf. Realistically you can reduce that $172K figure to around $110K - $130K after reducing the price to keep it competitive.

Kressilac



Derek Licciardi
President
Elysian Productions Inc.

Elysian Productions Inc. was formed little over two months ago so unfortunately at this time we do not have a web site up and running. It is currently under development and should be available inside of a few weeks. I will post here when we put up our web site.

Kressilac