1 million sales benchmark "preposterous"

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 7 February, 2011

An industry "misnomer" Conduit 2 dev says.

If a game sells one million copies it is considered by many to have been successful – but that's rubbish, according to one developer.

"That's a misnomer in our industry," High Voltage chief creative officer Eric Nofsinger told Eurogamer.

"By and large people look at it and they say, if it's not a million unit seller it's a flop. That's preposterous."

High Voltage is hard at work putting the finishing touches to the SEGA published Wii-exclusive shooter Conduit 2.

The game, the development of which is entirely funded by High Voltage, is the sequel to The Conduit – a game considered by many to have flopped and unlikely to have spawned a follow-up.

Far from it, according to Nofsinger.

"If I make this bottle of Coke, and let's say there's 10 pence of materials here – coloured water, sugar and a glass bottle – if I sell this for a pound, I've just made money.

"Whatever the product is, if it costs you less to make than you end up making off the thing, you make profit. As long as the profit margin is strong enough, then you get enough of a return and you can make another."

2010 saw a number of high-profile, high quality games fail to reach the million sales mark.

Ninja Theory's Enslaved and Platinum Games' Vanquish both failed sell a million copies – leading many to predict neither will see sequels.

But for Nofsinger, that is not necessarily the case.

"The biggest misconception of consumers of the industry is that million-unit benchmark," he said.

"When you really look at the number of games a year that sell over a million units, it's almost none of them. If that really were the minimum bar for a success, the game industry would be gone in under a year.

"There are thousands of games released that don't sell a million units. There are like 10 games a year that sell over a million units. But if you can sell a few hundred thousand copies – 300, 400 thousand copies, which is in the range that we did – we made money off that. We did well. Although it was a considerable budget for a Wii title, it was not the kind of budget a Gears of War had.

"If we'd spent the Gears of War money, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion now. We'd be back working on something else."

Looking ahead, Nofsinger said High Voltage expects Conduit 2 to sell more copies than its predecessor – and make the developer more money.

"We'd always like to make money. Everyone would. But if we sold the exact same number of units as we sold with Conduit 1, we'd be high-fiving each other. But I think we'll do better."

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (26) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • gribb #1 1 year ago

    It's all relative at the end of the day.

  • StolenGlory #2 1 year ago

    Tell Ninja Theory that.

  • sonicyoda #3 1 year ago

    It's really quite comforting to see developer's with this attitude. I think we all forget that sometimes game developers just want to be able to make games and aren't looking for that one big hit that allows them all to buy Ferraris and retire early.

  • mrblonde #4 1 year ago

    The WII is bound to be cheaper to develop on than the 360/ps3 it has last gen innards and SD visuals, plus graphical expectations off the gamer are far lower.
    With the massive dev teams and the 60mil budget and 5 year dev time of say, GT5, you can see how a million ,even first day sales is seen as a bad performance.
    I remember konami saying MGS4 had to sell 3 million in its first month to break even , that was a few years ago mind .Only microsoft exclusives, the few wii games that actually sell and obviously COD seem to generate massive profits in todays industry. The rest, especially long in development , very expensive, sony exclusives never get out of the red , even when their selling a million or two.
    Edited by mrblonde at 07/02/11 @ 15:00

  • Shikasama #5 1 year ago

    Exactly. Success is relative to your cost.

    If the games industry recognised this we could hear less about how piracy and second hand sales is 'killing it' and more about how efforts to reduce overheads and focus the design process have made smaller companies more profitable and less beholden to Ea and Activision.

  • Eraser #6 1 year ago

    It's a shame that I felt completely underwhelmed by what I saw of The Conduit, but I really, really like High Voltage as a development studio.

  • darleysam #7 1 year ago

    Gears of War 1 famously had a pretty small budget.. $10m according to Wikipedia.

  • Eldritch #8 1 year ago

    The Conduit sold close to half a million units worldwide, which isn't all that bad:

    [link url=http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/19541/the-conduit/
    ]http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/195...[/link]

    I'd love to see the game ported for PS Move!

  • NimbusTLD #9 1 year ago

    Try telling that to your publisher.

  • Murton #10 1 year ago

    @MrBlonde: last week this very site posted an article quoting a Sony conference call where it said that PS3 software had become the most profitable part of Sony's entire business, I very much doubt that's all from cert fees and royalties from third party publishers, a sizable amount will in fact come from their own games.

    Wasn't really aware of this particular bloke until now but he certainly is a refreshing change from the rest of the industry. He's a realist, he recognises that as long as a game breaks even it has achieved something, certainly a stark contrast to SEGA's complaints last week that it's 6 million worldwide sales of just three games were "poor"

    His attitude is almost enough to make me wish I still had a Wii so that I could play his games and support his work, I much prefer developers to be in the business of making great games than making great piles of cash. I'll definitely keep an eye out for High Voltage titles appearing on the PS3 in future though.

  • mrblonde #11 1 year ago

    All the conduit had going for it was, it looked "good for a wii game", which in truth it looked like an xbox original title, Aiming for visual finesse on the wii as a selling point is indeed , just pointless , even the worst 3rd party FPS on 360/ps3 game will look better.
    How much was the budget on the conduit? plus all the advertising etc , he doesnt give any figures. Say, just making a couple £100 thousand profit wont be enough for the likes of sega forever
    Edited by mrblonde at 07/02/11 @ 15:29

  • dave-on #12 1 year ago

    Do not let this man make you Coke.

  • persus-9 #13 1 year ago

    I've never heard of this misconception before but it's a daft one. How on earth do people think the indie scene survives? Oh wait, I guess most of them haven't heard of it because they just play COD and FIFA.

  • Bleemo #14 1 year ago

    So why then did the Reginator say that a wii game needs to sell a million copies to make a profit?

    [link url=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/90603-Wii-Games-Need-to-Sell-a-Million-Copies-to-Make-Profit
    ]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vie...[/link]

    Whilst it's obviously true that it is all relative many games DO need to sell approximately a million copies to make a decent profit. Remember as far as the shareholders are concerned they don't want to just make any profit they want a GOOD profit in order to compensate the risk they are making. In fact some games (RDR, GTA4, GT5,GoW3) need to sell more than 1 million copies to break even.

  • ChthonicEcho #15 1 year ago

    These devs are trying so hard to sell their franchise as anything more than a mediocre title. First they compare the first game to the first GTAs, now this.

    Yes, ideally, you need your earnings to outweigh the costs. But that is the bare minimum. Publishers aim for maximised profits and the potential for the appeal to expand. If you plan to create a quiet little title for a niche fandom, you will get next to no support from your publisher.

    It's not a 'misnomer' (I think the word he was looking for was misconception), it's a tried and calculated milestone that publishers seem to have unanimously agreed upon. The budget, price tags, costs, et al - all of these are carefully counted, calculated and measured. Nobody just pointed a finger at a million and went, "Hey, that's a pretty number, let's stick with it."

    Not that I am supporting publishers forcing many game developers to include uniform game mechanics to mimic successful titles and franchises, but the opposite of this point of view, "it's not the money that counts!", is just as ridiculous.

  • wizlon #16 1 year ago

    Sorry, I skimmed that, but did he say that if I buy Conduit 2 I will get high-fives off the developers... might pre-order it now.

  • trjp #17 1 year ago

    Kevin Smith was regularly called-out for making films not enough people went to see - but he highlights on his ''Evening with' DVD that his films are cheap to make so even if their cinematic release doesn't break-even, DVD sales will do so and more.

    This means he was making money for people so they'd keep letting him make films - endlessly.

    Then he made Cop Out...

  • BuddyChrist #18 1 year ago

    Minecraft is a good example of what he is saying..... Except he is talking about Conduit.

    For Conduit to be as great as he thinks and deserve a sequel, dev costs must have been pretty low

  • dagas #19 1 year ago

    It's because of Call of Duty. Because they can sell over 10m copies everything that doesn't reach at least a million seems low. the expectations of sales are getting crazy. Bioware was talking about selling 10m copies with their games. I think the roughly 2-3m copies of Dragon Age is great for a fairly traditional RPG. A few years ago I would have expected maybe half a million from something like that. EVE Online has had about 300k people playing it and it has done well for almost 8 years now and I've never thought of that as a budget MMO. They even remade all the graphics a few years ago and as all of their expansions they did it for free. I think that proves that you don't need millions of players.

  • Mkwone #20 1 year ago

    2010 saw a number of high-profile, high quality games fail to reach the million sales mark

    I'm sure it did, but your game wasn't high quality was it?

  • kangarootoo #21 1 year ago

    @ChthonicEcho

    Everything you say about making "enough money" rather than just "some money" is right.... on the money. My first reaction too was that breaking even is not a definition of success (to use his analogy, if you could make Vimto for 5p a bottle, why would you invest in coke).

    However, the key factor that he does refer to in the first place is the investment budget. A publisher that rocks up with $50m is quite entitled to say "3.5m copies sold, or we won't be back". But if they budget is $500k, they can't expect the same sales. Indeed, if we look at profit as a percentage of costs (which most businesses do), what he is saying makes perfect sense.

    It would help I guess if we had some numbers. Of course he didn't have the same budget as MW2, we can safely assume that. However, if MW2 made $30 for every $1 invested, and The Conduit only made $1.8.... his argument (though technically sound) doesn't really stand up when his own project is used as an example.


    "Nobody just pointed a finger at a million and went, "Hey, that's a pretty number, let's stick with it." "

    Well, they kind of have truth be told. I hear it pretty frequently, even though the games in questions have wildly varying dev and marketing budgets. Its absolutely true that when being specific, the industry (a fair bit of it anyway) is very aware of its predicted sales, expected returns, break even point etc etc.... but when making big statements at conventions, we just tend to go for 1 million because it sounds cool :)

  • cw- #22 1 year ago

    @trjp
    Then he made Cop Out...

    He only directed it, he didn't write it or anything. I saw him at the o2 in 09 (for an evening with..) and I'm pretty sure he said he only did Cop Out to please someone, and so he could do something else he wanted... but I could be totally wrong and remembering incorrectly there, it was over a year ago ;p

  • FenderMaster #23 1 year ago

    I'm sure to be negged like everyone else who suggested it, but corners were cut with The Conduit, it didn't cost much to produce, so it didn't need to sell many to profit, that is the nature of shovelware... not saying the Conduit was shovelware now, but it wasn't a very good game either...

    If they'd spend more money, had better artists, better level designs, better a.i. routines and more diverse enemies, it might have been a good game, but then it might not have made a profit... Either way, this low cost input, low sales = success mentality doesn't bode well for the Conduit 2, or indeed fps games in general where production values make such a huge difference.

  • killyourtv #24 1 year ago

    "It's preposterous!" *slams fist into table*

  • jackdoe #25 1 year ago

    It's kind of obvious that it really depends on budgets so games can still be successes even if they don't hit a million (like a lot of niche JRPGS). But let's be honest. Conduit 1 sucked anyway.

  • silversun #26 1 year ago

    I completley agree with them here, just yesterday searching for info on the last story sales , because i hope it will come over here and it done well in japan first few days over 100 thousand sales but read other games with worldwide releases sold 700-900 thousand not every game is gone sell over a million and i hope that companys dont see that as the figure at which it think game A OR B should sell.

    i have supported and gone out brought a fair few games that sold under the 1 million mark, so there are still people that buy good games that dont sell as well as the mainstream games.

    not games related but i guess bad sale example i can use is the bluray which ive had to switch to dvd because, Blu-ray volume of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood sold only 750 copies in the uk and now the wont bring over any more blu ray versions.