PS3 Games Must Sell 500,000 to Be Profitable

Speaking to US financial journal Bloomberg Takeo Takasu, President and Representative Director, of Namco Bandai, Japan's second biggest software house, told that due to the high cost of development for the PS3 a game must sell half a million copies to make a profit.

Takasu also pointed out that the Wii only costs half as much to develop graphics for, a figure that's going to look a lot more appealing to smaller publishers out there. Especially with the rate that Nintendo are belting out their hardware.

For example, the average cost of developing the graphics for a game on the PS3 is $8.6 million (that's £4,364,042 of our English pounds).

Obviously in the case of titles that are on both 360 and PS3, and where assets can be shared/re-used, the figure will be lower. However, when it comes to PS3-specific next-gen titles this is more likely to be the average and on the low side given some of the budgets that SPOnG has been made aware of.

With titles retailing at $59.99 (or £30.50, but do not expect that to be what us Brits'll pay for the software), 500,000 is a pretty hefty number of units to shift.

To make things a bit more transparent we'll let the numbers do a bit of talking. 27 titles have sold over 600,000 copies on the PS2 in the UK. But these are big releases. Plenty of PS2 titles have hit around the 100K mark or lower. That's a figure that's going to make a lot of publishers shift in their seats when thinking about a new PS3 release.

Of course, this won't be helped too much by Sony failing to make sufficient PS3 hardware available on release. We may well see a lot of software houses taking a "wait and see" approach on PS3 titles; holding off on development until a lot more PS3s are sat in front of our tellies.

The upshot of all these numbers is likely to be publishers turning further towards proven franchises and taking less and less chances on new IP. That makes us sad.