To the anonymous poster:

In this case, given the size of the company involved, I would tend to believe that any money required to go to the distributor was handled in the Disney share of the royalties. I say this because, given the wealth power and size of Disney, there wouldn''t be a retail chain in the company that wouldn''t pay Disney to have its games. That being said, I am a little leary of taking that statement that far and would think that any type of distribution deal Disney had with a retail chain( CompUSA ) would favor on Disney''s side, taking the distributor leverage and cost nearly out of the picture. I believe the offer was 15% of the sales price and not 15% of the wholesale price.

In case I am wrong about this, it is easy to see that my point is only accentuated by your statement. If the distributor received 20% of those sales price and then your royalties were computed afterwards. The numbers in my example would rise to 55,555 units to payback Disney and the revenue generated from an average sale without discounting the boxes for longer shelflife would fall to $97,500 or realistically between $50,000 and $60,000 in overall royalty money.

In my opinion, there are only two ways to make money in this industry. Self fund your game and hope that you can self publish it or get a publisher to buy into a completed game for a smaller chunk of the pie. Generating huge fan support for your game helps with this strategy though that fan base has to be supported with your own funds.

The second way is by getting a title paid for and by getting lucky enough to have your game begin to sell into the hundreds of thousands of copies. If you make a hit, well isn''t that the holy grail of game programming.

Both are risky propositions no matter how you size them up. It will be a few years before the game industry sees the likes of a Procter and Gamble style company in the industry. As it stands right now with the US recession, the tech stock scare that investors are in and other factors, you can expect investors to ignore the game industry in the immediate future or at the very best moderately invest in titles that show very little risk.

Kressilac

ps I do hope all of this outlook is very different in twelve months. As a matter of fact, I am beginning to bet on it.