These days, many executives, analysts, and even gamers believe if a title hasn’t sold over a million copies then it not successful or deserving of a sequel. Eric Nofsinger, Chief Creative Officer of The Conduit developer High Voltage, says that’s insane.
"That's a misnomer in our industry," 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 currently working on the Wii-exclusive Conduit 2, a sequel that wouldn’t have been produced if only million sellers were truly successful.
"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,” he said. "The biggest misconception of consumers of the industry is that million-unit benchmark.”
Nofsinger explains that budgets are very important, with titles like The Conduit being able to sell lower than a million units due to smaller, more conservative budgets.
"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,” Nofsinger comments.
“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.”
The Sega-published Conduit 2 is expected at retail in North America on April 19, 2011.
