Hello,

I'm making a french video report about video games dematerialization and I need some informations in the cost allocation of the final price of a game so I hope GameDev community will be able to help me !

So I searched on the internet about PSN, Xbox Live and Wii Ware developer program and I found that :

- For Xbox Live, it is easy to publish a game on the marketplace, it is $99/year and there is a 30 % commission fee on sales (is it true 30% ?)
- For PSN and Wii Ware, their development program is closed to public so I didn't got any information, do they have a commission fee too ? I saw that you have to buy their development kit that is around $2K - $10K

About editors profit margin, i would like to know how much percent they save by dematerializing a game.

When a game is published by an editor, what is the average percent repaid to the developer ?

On AFJV website (Video game french agency), they present this allocation of costs for a manufactured game (2006 dated, now the tax is 19,6%)

16,4 % French VAT
28,5 % Final Distribution
18,9 % Royalties console manufacturer
14 % Wholesale Distribution
10 % Marketing
12,2 % Development + license costs
= 100 %

So I imagine that for a 100 % dematerialized game it is :


16,4 % French VAT
[s]28,5 % Final Distribution[/s]
18,9 % Royalties console manufacturer ?
[s]14 % Wholesale Distribution [/s]
10 % Marketing ?
12,2 % Development + license costs ?
? Comission Fee
= ? %

Can you please help me ?

Thanks in advance !

Thank you in advance !

Actually Xbox indie is easy to get into, I believe Xbox live is also closed to the general public. (Xbox indie is a small section of live)

The actual cost of a major title is not something any studio will give away freely. They range from around $1M USD for a so-called 'shovelware' app, up to several tens of millions of dollars for a major AAA game.

In my experience the cost ranges from $2M to $10M for development, $2M-$8M for advertising, and for physical media another $1M-$10M depending on your distribution channels, etc.

One major DS games I was with (selling roughly 2M units) cost about $2.5M to develop. Marketing, distribution, and all the other costs were also expensive. We almost didn't ship in France because we (the group) did not want to comply with some of their stupid legal restrictions on games, they cost us almost an extra quarter million to satisfy; for example their requirements on voice actors is just stupid.