The hardware margins are insanely large, but how can you calculate the software costs? Software engineers aint cheap. I’m not defending I’m just understanding that its not free to sell video games. I’m not buying an 80$ game.
80$ likely pays for around an hour of one engineers time, if that
They do. Looked it up for the discussions around this topic. Odyssey was around 50-100mil budget. The Switch Zeldas were apparently 100-150mil. Miyamoto once said, they'd need to sell at least 2mil copies to even make it out the red (x60-70$) with BotW. And that money needs to be spent before a single copy gets sold. Generally, we're talking $15'000 a month per developer on your staff + marketing + admin etc.
Two million sales are still at indie range nowadays, AAA games get multiple times more than that, AC Odyssey sold 14 million and it wasn't that big of a hit.
Odyssey sold 14 million and it wasn't that big of a hit.
Super Mario Odyssey 29 million
That doesn't make sense, which one is it? My point was, that by his statement, we can estimate what the general ballpark of development cost was for those games, despite Nintendo being very secretive about their development cost in general. Didn't try to say anything about successfulness
we can estimate what the general ballpark of development cost was for those games, despite Nintendo being very secretive about their development cost in general.
It is nowhere near the profit they make, my man, they made 1.7 BILLIONS from Super Mario Odyssey alone, that's 10x what Cyberpunk 2077 cost to develop; there's a reason they have been having record profits for years now.
I think you're a bit lost... I'm not entirely sure why you brought AC Odyssey into this discussion in the first place, when I was clearly talking about Super Mario Odyssey (didn't think I need to specify that in a discussion about Switch games) nor is anyone talking about profits. This is literally just about how much development costs and how much development cost rose. I know how much money the Switch games made... I didn't even mention the word profits once.
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u/Itkillsmeinside 1d ago edited 1d ago
The hardware margins are insanely large, but how can you calculate the software costs? Software engineers aint cheap. I’m not defending I’m just understanding that its not free to sell video games. I’m not buying an 80$ game.
80$ likely pays for around an hour of one engineers time, if that