Oregano said:



Spoiler Just wait for God Eater details Prepare for things to get ridiculous then. Click to expand...

So rolling back on the Falcom thing and my starting point in general, let me try to explain this another way, since I think I've failed to communicate what I was saying well.Let's say that between salary, benefits, office space, and hardware/software, it costs the equivalent of $60,000 to staff an artist for one year on a low end Japanese video game.Let's also say that a publisher gets $40 from a full price game sold to a retailer after licensing fees, manufacturing, and retailer margin.In order to cover the cost of an additional artist, it take 4500 additional units. If your project has 2-3 more artists, that's an additional 9000-13,500 units that have to be sold in order to cover cost increases.Now, for Falcom in particular, this may not be true. Duckroll raises the point that they have more projects now that they're a three team studio, and might be able to rotate staff more efficiently to amortize any cost increase caused by additional staff. This is certainly something that has to be assessed on a per studio basis and is hard to know from the outside.But, moving back to the general case, imagine a game that sells 60,000-100,000 units. Raising the sales requirement by 9000-13,500 would be a lot. The game also has to handle the fact that sales might go down, given trends in the Japanese market.This is mainly what I was wondering about when I was talking about the 3DS transition. Like, Fire Emblem and Monster Hunter are going to make money hand over fist even if they have to triple their budget. That's not an issue. But when we start looking at games that sell 30K, 60K, or maybe even 100K, it's where I start to wonder more about the economics as things transition and the market becomes harsher.On this note, I looked at Shift's website, and they're hiring for Unity experience. Looking at that trailer again, it's plausibly a Unity 5 game, which would be able to run on Vita (though uh, with Unity Vita performance).