Would there be any interest in recording the number of copies a game sold on the first week (this is usually reported, other similar numbers may be more difficult to ascertain), production costs, if the game turned profit (or pure losses or barely covered production costs), etc.
Like Crysis apparently cost 22 millions(!!!) to create, and still "managed" to make profit (after a while).
Usually the number of copies sold on first week is reported, production costs and if the game actually was profitable are often left in the dark. These are still interesting in some manner.
I'd like to see complete numbers, sales figures, profit, and manufacturing stats recorded, first week, yearly, official discontinuation. Problem though, private companies are not required to report this info. Even when companies are publicly owned (sells shares), they just outright lie, as do the private companies. I remember an article in Next Generation magazine where they tallied up all the information available from some big gaming comanies (I think it was Nintendo, Sega, EA, Sony, and a private company I don't recall). According to their figures, it was impossible to make any profit from videogames. The figures the companies claimed had them losing billions of dollars per title. These figures showed, for instance, that Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 would both have to cost over $250 to break even (they were $80 at the time, having been reduced from $120). A followup article pointed out that Nintendo was claiming the development cost of the N64 (including all the onyx workstations they'd purchased) in their figures of Mario 64, then claiming them again for Mario Kart (which turned out to be perfectly acceptable to the IRS). They also found that, despite the dismal sales of the Sega CD, a shovelware title from the Genesis with minimal extras was estimated to cost Sega an addition 9 cents to place on the shelves next to the Genesis titles. At $40 to $49 each, Sega was rolling in profit from their 'dismal' sales of CD games.
So, when this info is added to a game entry, I think it is important to say "Company X claims..."
I'd also like to "see" them but not recording them in UVL.
1.) As Zerothis said those figures are relying too much on assumptions and biased information given by publishers.
2.) Those figures only appear for high quality mainstream games if at all. Where do you want to get all that information for non high-profile games?
On the validity of the claims made by the companies? I don't think that matters, we're not legal authority for such information, so the accuracy is obviously limited to what the companies themselves report, and accuracy beyond that is the duty of accounting and we're not here to do that for them. If they want to claim better sales than they have, or lower production costs, it's their choice, it has no effect on us as long as we can point in their direction and say "that's what they said".
That's a bit like questioning the validity of the official game descriptions.
"Company X claims..."
A more neutral way to say that would be "information provided by X" :)
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