Where the money goes (kinda)

Raph points us to the Forbes article on breakdown of costs of 'next gen titles' (using Gears of War as the case study).

As he points out, there's a gross oversimplification here. All of these percentages(for an individual title, as well as over a portfolio of titles) dial up/down over the lifetime of a title, as does teh ASP of the title. ALso, there's a tradeoff of risk/reward that occurs between partners (eg. bigger advance vs lower royalty after the fact).

Still, it's a good read to get one perspective.

On thing that is interesting: They have disty margin of 1.5%, and retailer margin at 20%. Not sure those are exactly accurate, but they are in the ballpark. Interesting that it's almost a complete flip from, say, 10-15 years ago, where disties often commanded 20% or greater margins and small retailers, well, no Le Sieur peas for them!