quote:
Originally posted by Saxon:
A few months back there was a article in PC Gamer called “Where does your gaming buck go” or something like that. It broke down all the costs of a game and why we pay what we pay. One of Shrapnel’s secrets is that they don’t pay a lot of those costs.
They can not possibly be paying those costs and feed Aaron. Back in 92 the breakdown went like this :
1) Retailer marks up from distributer by 50-100%.
2) Distributer marks up from marketer by 50-100%.
3) Marketer pays developer a "very generous" 5-10% of what they get. The rest goes for manufacturing, advertising, and paying the staff overhead.
So a $40 game at the store gets the distributer maybe AT MOST $26.50, the marketer maybe AT MOST $17.50, and the developer AT MOST $1.75 BUT ONLY FOR THE UNITS ACTUALLY SOLD. A game was considered to do extremely well if half the units manufactured were sold, with the distributer and marketer eating the returns from retailers. How that split broke out varied, typically the retailer would get half what they paid back and the distributer would get half what they paid back. The developer got a "generous" say $2000 when the first manufacturing run occurred (5000 units). Then if the game sold well he would get a check for the latest run's sales just before the next run. But if a run was a bust the game would be closed out and all his effort would go down the drain. Back in 92 I was told that for my effort my game would be considered a HUGE success if it sold 20,000 units and the retail price would be up to me, but not to expect more than maybe $5000 in the first year. I said **** THAT, and quit working on it right then and there.
One thing to remember is that the number of computers has increased by a factor of 100 in the Last ten years alone. So instead of $5000 I bet Aaron is getting $50,000. But that still SUCKS because at a real job he could get $50-75 an hour if he is a decent programmer, which he probably is even though his engine seems to be optimized for memory rather than execution time.....