Beyond Divinity Peek of the Week #34

The thirty-fourth installment of RPGVault’s “Peek of the Week” feature for the upcoming Divine Divinity sequel is now available. This time, project leader Swen Vincke talks about the economics involved in developing and selling a game, as well as the future of the development studio. An excerpt:

The reasoning behind this is simple; if it costs, for instance, $2 million to make a game, assuming a lucky developer gets $5 from the full price, then it needs to sell 400,000 copies at full price, something a lot never manage to do. And $2 million really isn’t all that much if you think of what gamers will be expecting in the next two years in terms of content and how many people it takes to deliver that content.

However, $2 million is a lot of money, and considering the risks of investing in games, there aren’t that many people out there who are willing to take that risk unless they are absolutely sure they’ll get their money back – which obviously isn’t all that simple, given that not many games make the 400,000 mark, at least not when it comes to PC games.