Ouch at that article. Completely agreed with the author that Nintendo really should let Adelman get out there to publicity.
I'm hoping that most games in eShop do at least decent numbers. There are a few success stories but overall I'm really skeptical about the sales (but I really hope I'm wrong).
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I recall a while back the developer of Unepic reported that his game was profitable after two weeks on the eShop. Hopefully, we hear more stories like this.
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Quoting back a bit, but I've seen Unepic brought up as an example of success for eShop a few times now and I feel something needs to be said about it. However it's worth remembering that profitable doesn't mean much especially in this case. Being profitable simply means that the game isn't on loss anymore. So far the game could've made profit for like 500 euros so far for all we know, and that wouldn't be much.
For this case it especially doesn't mean much because the game was ported by pretty much a single guy working for a few months (5? 7? 10? Maybe something like that?) probably mostly full time (I don't know, maybe some work with the PC version in that time too). Thus the port couldn't have been that expensive, maybe something like 10-40k euros (the development itself + the rating costs + QA)? (Worth noting that I really don't have a clue how much porting such an indie game might cost, but surely it can't be that expensive? If someone has any better knowledge then please feel free to correct me.)
Since the game sold for 10 euros, that's 7 euros (Nintendo's cut being 30%) revenue to the publisher/dev. Say, if the cost of the port was 20k euros, to be profitable the game would have to sell about 2900copies. For 30k euros the game would have to sell about about 4300 copies and for 40k euros the game would have to sell about 5700 copies.
I would say in any case that it's quite little especially considering it was out in 2 regions at the same time. Also the fact that it was 2 weeks and game sales typically tend to be front loaded for the first few days.
Of course though, the game can keep on selling especially during sales since it hasn't had any so far.