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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

If this keeps going they're going to end up as profitable as Minecraft!

GTA V is already more profitable than Minecraft, even though Minecraft has sold more units across all platforms (http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/03/minecraft-pc-sales-at...).

33 Million units at ~$20 is $660 million in revenue. This isn't including development costs, which are low for Minecraft but not zero (I'm guessing $5-$10 million over its lifetime.) Subtracting GTAV's combined development and marketing budget of $265 million still puts it ahead of Minecraft at $735 million, and it still has a lot more runway left.

But Take 2 has to share that revenue with retailers. Minecraft has direct sales, no?

> Minecraft has direct sales, no?

A cut through the iOS store, a cut through the Google Play store, a cut through Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace.

The IGN article says Minecraft sold 12 million on PC, so it's paying cuts on the other 21 million.

Minecraft PC sales are almost exclusively Mojang's money (except for merchant fees) except when it comes to the giftcards that can be purchased in stores like Target. Minecraft Xbox is a licensed product so it's fairly safe to assume that Mojang are sharing a non-negligible portion of the revenue with Microsoft. Pocket Edition is sold through mobile stores and developed by Mojang.

The Mojang and Notch AB financial records are public -- as it is the way Sweden works -- by the way, if for whatever reason you want to look into the money that they're making.

Heh, except the cost to develop is much lower. So they will probably never achieve the same level of profitability, even if they achieve better revenue.

It doesn't really matter if margins are lower as long they have positive return (NPV) on every additional dollar spend

I think it depends on what you mean by "level of profitability". In absolute terms (i.e. how many coins could you put in a money bin), it should be achievable; but as a percentage (i.e. how you would measure it as an investor) it likely won't get there simply because the expenses for creating Minecraft were relatively low.

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