Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players

33. Profit, Loss, and Metrics

Growth and profit are a product of how people work together.

—RICARDO SEMLER

Games often require a huge capital investment. Investors who put up resources to finance a game will want to know what the odds are that they will get their money back. One way to attempt to predict this is to create a profit and loss statement or P&L. The P&L lists all the costs and various projections of the revenues for the project to give investors an idea of the potential profit. This statement usually takes the form of a spreadsheet.

Profit and Loss

TABLE 33.1 is a spreadsheet for a hypothetical mobile racing game that would have a retail cost of $2. Revenue estimates are based on three scenarios: a worst-case scenario, an average ...