How much does it cost EA to make a pack?

"logion;c-17656946" wrote:
(A normal wage/month *100-200 people) * 6-12 months should give you a rough estimate. I assume that around 100-200 people are making these packs (at least that's the amount if people involved according to credits) and them making a pack like this should take something between 6 months to a year.

If we say this pack took a year and was made by 100 people, and for simplicity, all people have a yearly wage of 24,000 USD (lowest average in the US), then this cost them at least 2400000 USD in salaries. In order to cover that, their packs would have to sell 120300 copies. (1 copy costs about 19.99 USD I believe).

The average salary for a dev working at EA is 86,000 a year. Other costs in game development are sound engineers, artists, designers, etc., which are typically in the range of 70k. And we can't forget the costs of marketing hardware maintenance, the actual running costs of the space, insurance, etc. So by those calculations we're looking at maybe $10 million to make an expansion?

In which case they would need to sell 300-400k copies to break even. I know that they say TS4 has 20 million unique players, but that doesn't necessarily tell the whole story about their player base. Plus, it was bad sales that shut down Maxis in the first place (not saying that would happen over a game pack).