Only 4% Of Games Make A Profit – EEDAR

So many games, so little time. But do you ever wonder what happens to the also-rans? The non-AAA titles and the ones that don’t have the huge marketing budgets behind them? Or even those that do, but just.. don’t work? The answer, according to market analysts EEDAR, is not very much.

EEDAR offer a service to games publishers where they run the numbers on games in development and try to predict how they will perform. The success rates make sobering reading for any game developer.

Only 4% of games that make it to market actually make a profit, according to EEDAR’s research. Somewhere in the region of 60% of a typical game’s budget goes on reworking and retuning a game to make it fit for market.

“No one or two things can determine the success or failure of a game,” says EEDAR President Geoffrey Zatkin. “Every game I have ever worked on, we’ve gone in blind as to which features would sell the game better.”

Cooking Up A Blockbuster Game [Forbes]