Bethesda ships 7 million Skyrim launch units, expects $450 million in return

@Helghast102
Never fails, someone always has to tell us that they are going to wait for the GOTY. Guess what? No one cares.

@Klearwater Killer doubt he/she would get the same response if said "going to buy it now"

@Helghast102

Why would you wait for a year, or possibly even more time just to save like $30-$40, when you can get the game now and enjoy the already over 300 hours of content?

I understand why you would want to that, but I will never understand those that claim they're fans yet still decide to wait.

I'm waiting for GotY edition as well, but for my 3rd copy, which I plan to get for the PS3. I already have a regular PC version and the Collector's 360.

@Helghast102
Same. I'm not spending $50 on a game, then another $50 to make it as good as the complete $40 GOTY edition.

@Helghast102
Lucky for you, the collector's editions of Nirvana's "Nevermind" and REM's "Life's Rich Pageant" were both released this year! Now you can finally catch up on what people have been talking about for the last 20 years.

@Rannxz
You are what's wrong with gaming.

@Klearwater Killer Who pissed in your cereal?

@Helghast102
You're missing out on some awesome entertainment right at this very moment and for months an months to come. Have fun next year though.

@Rannxz

I'm not a fan, and I'm more than happy to wait until the GOTY edition is $15 on the next big Steam sale. Maybe I'll see what all the hubbub is then, but I'm a patient man with no investment in the franchise. I was burned by Daggerfall, and bored by Oblivion. I can wait.

I only mention this because I know that it matters to Klearwater.

@swooded Am I? Im kinda busy with Dark Souls and Uncharted 3 to notice, nice of you to care though.

@Rannxz

"I will never understand those that claim they're fans yet still decide to wait. "

so these days if you don't buy a game at launch, you're not a real fan? that's idiotic.

@Helghast102...I don't think it's your decision to wait on a GOTY edition of Skyrim, it's the fact that you announced this and stated little else. It's not quite the equivalent of saying First in the first post, but it was about as useful.

No amount of patches could make Nevermind worth listening to.

@Slight of Ham I don't get it.
I show an intent to purchase in an article about sales and get slammed because I decided to wait for it. It's not as though Im a fan of TES anyway, I can wait 5 years if I wanted to, doesn't change anything for me.
What if I had stated 2 years from now in the "Skyrim GoTY edition announced bla bla" article, that I was going to get it? How would that be any more insightful?

@Helghast102
you dont get it...there is always some idiot who has to mention that he/she is going to get the GOTY edition....Like we are interested in your finances or game inventory. I dont care if you wait friggin forever to get it.....if at all!

@Klearwater Killer
Then what is the point in making a comment in the first place? Is it only acceptable to make the typical "congrats" comment or the " I like this game" comment? Both are equally useless.
Shit

@shteevie

lol, cold....

@Helghast102


Time is money, money is time. You're saving money now at the cost of what will probably be more than a year. Or you're saving the time and paying the retail price.

Personally if I died tomorrow at least I can say that I played Skyrim a little bit.

@Klearwater Killer What the hell do you think a comment section is for beyond expressing your own personal opinions and concerns, and fostering discussion? I'm pretty sure the writers handle the info people care about.

@stiqlol Usually the DLC, adds up in price to more than the original retail value, while only adding a quarter the amount of content. So instead of paying 60 now, you can pay 50 a year later after clearing up the rest of the 15+ amazing titles that came out in these past few months and get 50 dollars worth of dlc + the original game then.

@Yuutuu
yeah, and i posted my opinion. What? dont like it?

In other news, ive decided I'm going to pick this game up in 2017 for $4.99.

@maveric101
I think the argument is playing some other game over a game you claim to be a fan of. As in, playing Uncharted 3 before Skyrim even though you claim to be a much bigger fan of Skyrim than Uncharted would clearly state otherwise. Not saying Helghast said anything like that, but I can see the point of arguing.

Anyways, Skyrim is awesome. I don't think I could have held out another hour after it was released.

@Rannxz Why buy three copies? I can almost understand the buy it now, then buy GotY for the extra content on the same console. But getting it on three different systems that you can't transfer the save games to doesn't make much sense to me.

@Rannxz

You're buying 3 versions of a single game?

This kind of post gets an up vote?

...Really?

*shakes head*

@Helghast102

People are arguing with you because on every post about Skyrim, there is ALWAYS a bunch of people who say they will wait for the GOTY version. Yes, we get it, this game will most likely have a GOTY version. The only drawback is you have to wait another year or so.

@KungFuChaosNinja

It's very easy to purchase multiple copies when you'd gladly want to support the developers. I did it with Oblivion, I did it with Fallout 3, and I'll do it with Skyrim.

@SmilinGoat

If I recall correctly, then it is usually in the tens of millions after it is all said and done for most big games these days. I wouldn't expect it to have cost 100 million or more, so less than that.

I am sure they will sell more than 7 million copies after word goes around about how amazing this game truly is. It will easily be Bethesda's best selling game ever! This game should in my opinion sale up to 20 million copies, but then again it is up to others to decide.

@doublerainbow
Skyrim will have cost the publisher $100M easily.

You're talking about ~100 people making ~80k/year [average for non-executives (not including benefits)] for 5 years.

That's 40 million right there.

Add in all the copies of Photoshop, 3DS Max, and MS Office they needed to buy [at full retail], the ~$3000 PCs, PS3 and 360 dev kits [dev kits are about $3k each], the music suite, rent for the building, yadda yadda. Some of this is sunk cost from previous games, but a lot of that will be new purchases, too, unless you assume they made Skyrim on the exact same hardware they made Fallout 3 on.

Then, you have marketing, which for triple-A titles like this, easily surpasses $50 million by itself, and often, as was the case for many of the games it released against, over $100M.

So, yeah, a safe guesstimate is in the neighborhood of ~$200M to make the game, but probably more.

Now, to the original stats: if they ship 7 million copies of a game, and expect $450M in return, that nets out to ~$65 per copy shipped, which is more than retail price. Shipped copies are not sold copies; you have to expect that a large portion of those [maybe 25%] won't ever get sold. Retailers take a 60% cut for boxed products, including software. Steam takes less, but its still significant. Average Beth's cut to 50%.

(((7M*.75)*$60)*.5)=$157.5M expected return on copies of the game itself. I'd expect that they are still in the hole when you compare that return to the development costs of the game.

So, they are expecting to pull in ~$300M on Soundtracks, game guide, and DLC. Interesting. I wonder how much the horse armor will cost this time?

@shteevie

yup, a lot of AAA games these days cost $100+ million.

@shteevie

Most that figure is screwed up to me. I dont believe your suppose to add rent, software, and dev kits into one games dev costs.

You need to pay the rent to work,
you need software and dev kits to make the games they do

@Hunter141072

One of the things I really hate about Bethesda is that they release their games on all three platforms.

They always screw the PC gamers to keep the simultaneous release. Skyrim being a prime example.

@arkweld Oh, sorry, the incredibly deep, fleshed out and endlessly explorable world with hundreds of hours of content wasn't enough for you? Sorry you got "screwed" by that one. Just cause you can't max out your GPU's doesn't mean you got screwed, baby.

@arkweld

A freely released exceedingly in-depth Construction Kit is such a big screw over of the PC community right.

@arkweld
I hear ya. Built for the lowest common denominator. Shame really.

@TheDarkWayne I'll stop bitching about Consolization when PC games have menus that actually handle a mouse

@Sage009

From that complaint I can straight up tell you have pirated the game, and didn't even bother to do that properly. The mouse not working in menus is something which was fixed in the 0 day patch for people who, you know, actually bought the game and have some semblance of a right to level criticisms towards Bethesda.

@iHavePants

BURRRRRNNNNNNNNN!!!!!

@iHavePants

that patch didn't fix the fact that rebinding keys breaks the game, or the lazy textures and shadows, the display glitches or the UI which is one of the worse designs on PC.

When they manage to fix the key bindings and UI I might actually be able to play the game in a way that doesn't make me want to put a fist through the monitor.

@This Little Man Says His Name Is

Oh you mean the "Community Fix-it Kit?"

Nice of Bethesda to outsource the problems to save them effort.

@arkweld

You complained about the mouse, which is ONLY an issue for pirates. I shouldn't bother responding, but sick of seeing stuff like this being posted and ignoring it.

-Rebinding is fine for most people(except for how it doesn't tell you that rebinding first person will also change the favourite key, hardly a game ruining experience however). This is the first complaint I've seen about it.

-Yep, texture resolution isn't great, but the art direction sure is which more than makes up for it. There are tweaks out there to make the shadows look better and I'm sure there'll be a graphics extender of sorts out within a month or 2. But really, neither of those things make the game no longer fun or engrossing.

-The UI works fine, though is explained poorly. Most people who have an issue with it don't know you can bind things in your favourites to hotkeys because the game doesn't ever seem to straight up tell you that. I really don't understand people saying it works better on a gamepad considering that you can do everything just as quickly using only Tab-W-A-S-D and E, plus with the added functionality of your mouse (which, again, would work if you had bought the game or at least known how to patch it.)

I'm sure plenty of Bethesda employees are wanting to put their own fists through their personal monitors due to pirates complaining about the mouse UI functionality, spreading moronic lies about their product.

@arkweld

You know sometimes i wonder if some p.c. users are just ignorant or plain stupid, i always, ALWAYS hear complains about: the game not running, being too slow, too ugly, etc.... I must say that the only game that was a very cheap port was GTA IV, all the Bethesda titles that i have are running excellent in my p.c. and i don´t have an ultimate alienware or something like that. my computer is almost 3 years old, i have a quad and an ATI hd 3870, and i can play all the latest titles with excellent visuals and speed, the only one who gave me some trouble and the main reason why i´m going to buy an Nvidia card was the witcher 2, and i´m going to get one for less than 200 bucks, and that´s here in mexico were things are far more expensive than in the US or Europe, how is possible that I can have a p.c. that can run almost everything at perfect speed ( SKYRIM INCLUDED) but there are some guys who have access to better gfx cards at better prices and are complaining about bad ports??? all i can say is Skyrim is a great port, a great game and if you have a decent p.c. (and two brain cells) you can enjoy one of the best games of the year.

@iHavePants

First complaint? Not looking very hard are you?

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1261029-keybinding-issues-2-hotkeys-favorites-numpad-drop-item-take-book-spend-dragon-soul-etc/

Only 211 replies in that thread before it was locked for size.

And I never mentioned the mouse, but it seems apparent that plenty of people have that issue:

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1270383-bug-vertical-look-speed-tied-to-frame-rate/

@Hunter141072

You lost your own argument right there by stating it's a "great port."

Exactly the problem. It's a port. Straight from the 360 to monitors everywhere with little regard for the PC platform, interface or technology.

@arkweld

My mistake, I thought you were the other guy. I know of the discrepancy between vertical and horizontal sensitivity(that's not what Sage was talking about), and the other I came across when rebinding my POV key to Z.

First one is bothersome I agree, so I downloaded a mod to lock my framerate, and the mapping issue was only a momentary annoyance until I searched for what was going on. Basically all they need to do is change the prompt in menus to reflect your new binding and I'm hopeful it will be in the patch.

These are minor quibbles though in the overall scheme of things, and I definitely don't feel "screwed".

@arkweld Whenever I see PC gamers, or I should say the bad whines I understand don't represent the whole, complaining about "consolization" or being screwed or sold out, it's almost invariably about keybindings, framerate or some nearly meaningless thing like that. Games are supposed to be enjoyable creative experiences, if you have to suffer the, let's face it, incredibly minor annoyance of something like key bindings in order to enjoy something as wonderful as exploring the world of Skyrim, well, that's a small price to pay.

@arkweld

well, first of all i should make you to note that EVERYTHING is developed on the p.c. ALWAYS, all the tools are on the p.c. and pcs are used for creating every single game that exists, so at the end the game is always developed on the p.c. it´s not like they made in on the xbox and then ported it to the p.c., now it´s true that sometimes games are more optimized for the xbox or ps3 and it´s also true that sometimes they leave the game with the same speed and visual quality that was used for the x box, true... but with skyrim and many others is not the case, and to be honest what´s your problem with the word port??? there are great ports out there, you don´t need to develop the game exclusively for the p.c to have quality, arkham is a good example of a game with the same quality that the consoles version and even more, so what´s the problem?? your eyes can´t handle which kind of resolution?? as i said people only complains of stupid things, the game is very configurable, visually is great and i´m very happy that very few guys are having problems with the "jagged" edges on one texture and that´s why they don´t like it.

@arkweld pc users screwed over??? the pc version has one thing that the console versions dont... the ability to create and use mods which when done right can even add more content into the game