500,000 is a pretty big ask for a niche series, but also nowhere near enough to justify a $10 million budget. Assuming those are full price sales (again, a big ask), they’d be looking at around $30 million gross, but the net profit is significantly less than this.
Epic takes 5% ($1.5m) as a licensing fee for UE5 and Steam/Sony/Microsoft take another 30% or so for all digital sales. For physical sales, manufacturing, shipping, retailer costs, and platform fees end up eating up around 50% of the total sale price, so assuming around half of those 500,000 sales are physical and the other half are digital, the publisher will come away with around $16.5m.
$6.5m may seem like a decent return at first glance, but for them to sell 500,000 copies at $60, they’re going to have to market the game pretty well. Most publishers spend between $0.25 and $0.50 for every dollar spent during development on marketing, which on a $10 million budget, works out to be between $2.5m and $5m, thus bringing the total profit down to just $1.5m - $4m.
Again, that’s still a profit, right, but what if the team goes over budget? By all accounts, the development of Shenmue 1 and 2 dragged on for a lot longer than Sega had originally intended (Nagoshi had to be brought in to wrap things up and get the first game over the line, iirc) and Shenmue 3 was delayed multiple times, which Deep Silver will have had to foot the bill for. Suddenly, that $1.5m - $4m is being used to pay for a delay and the project is in the red. Oh, and YS Net still needs to be paid developer royalties if there is any kind of profit left over.
Even if everything does go smoothly and the game comes out on time, do you really think there are many publishers who will want to take that kind of gamble? The number of people who backed the Kickstarter was nowhere near 500,000, so they’d be banking on a lot of non-Shenmue fans picking up the game at full price. Sure, it’s possible that Mr. Suzuki could find a way to make the game more appealing to mainstream gamers, but who’s to say that he doesn’t alienate some of the existing fans in doing so?
I’m not trying to piss on your picnic or anything and firmly believe that there is a way to make another Shenmue game financially viable, but it is not quite as simple as them just finding a publisher who can afford to drop $10m on the project and then promising 500,000 sales. As fans, it’s easy for us to make these kinds of suggestions on a forum, but in reality, securing funding for a project of this scale is difficult work and is going to take time. It may also take some pretty big compromises on Mr. Suzuki’s part, and so I think that we as a fanbase should prepare ourselves for that.
