Cornholio wrote on Jan 9, 2012, 15:18:
A billion?.... 1 in 7 people in the world(china 1.3b, India 1.2b, 4.5 for the rest of the world). Games that break a couple million are considered to be doing good. But a Billion? Some exaggeration there.
The biggest cost appears to be advertising these days and not the game production.
Think he meant sales $, not sales #. Some games, like CoD, can do a billion in sales. But that's not most games.
Most games are like Dead Island, which sell 1-3 million, and benefit heavily from multiplatforming. Games like that wouldn't be possible without targeting a very wide berth of potential customers. They sell heavily on consoles, with some nice backup sales on PC for a little porting effort.
For games like Skyrim, yea, less reason to have bad ports. But even those devs are often put under constraints (like a Christmas deadline) that makes gettting all the features in-time difficult.