Roughly 2,757,156 copies sold costing about $60 USD a piece equals $165,429,630.

Realistically..? I'd say probably $2-3m of the $165m.

That doesn't make Bethesda special. That means they're still just pathologically hoarding cash as a corporation.

Where did you get that 2,757,156 number?

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40944/USA/

And I'm unsure, but that may be the U.S. alone.

Doesn't surprise me i've heard it costs like $1 to $5 per gigabyte of bandwith used on the Sony Network by developers for players to download stuff. That's a hefty chunk of change and that's why I really foresee PC gaming dominating the console industry. It's a matter of greed in all honesty as the console developers want to rake in as much $$$ as possible from their investments. Sadly it becomes a problem of what's needed to keep it running with some profit vs what's needed with MAJOR profits.

It's probably U.S. only since the global retail sales were http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-16-valve-skyrim-fastest-selling-game-in-steam-history, and if we are to believe the numbers that were http://www.vgchartz.com/article/88459/skyrim-sales-exceed-34-million-units-in-two-days/ two days after the game was launched then about 86% of those sales are console versions.

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/40944/Global/ (AFAIK) show that approximately 5,205,267 xbox copies have been sold and 3,149,407 PS3 copies, which brings the total to 8,354,674

Is that reliable?

Edit: Doesn't seem to be.

Well my friend, any data you find is going to be speculation until Bethesda itself releases the total number of sales when they close the book on their fiscal year, so T_T

There's this too.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/skyrim-the-elder-scrolls-v-statistics/

Either way, that just further validates my original point: They are pathologically hoarding the money that could be spent on polishing every title to absolute gold. And same goes for "paying out to all the people who helped." Even if 10% of the total profits are going back in to the hands of the employees, that still means the company itself is holding 90% overall. Enough to develop around 5 to 6 polished games on an $85m budget.

A quick googling turned up that game developer's average salary in the US is around $100k. That means it would only take 5 people working on a patch for a month to cause that cost, not including other factors

That's fair and well, but at which stage in your career can you expect that kind of salary? I can't imagine that the upper 20's and mid 30 year old developers have been in the industry the 15+ years it takes to reach that kind of salary.

Perhaps that's the kind of salaries places like The Art Institutes advertise to those "career builder" websites, but I just don't see that being realistic. I'd say the true medium salary probably falls anywhere in between 40 to 50k a year.

Average means you add up all the people, divide by the total. That means while many make under that, there are more than enough making over it to offset that.

"Results of a 2010 survey indicate that the average salary for a game programmer is USD$95,300 annually. The least experienced programmers (with less than 3 years experience) generally earn about $74,600, while developers with over six years experience on average earn $125,700."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_programmer#Salary

You're not thinking about this right, which is why you are surprised by these numbers: becomming a game programmer isn't easy, even if you have the skills, as the opportunities to be hired are few and far between, but the need for them is still high, so the compensation must be high.

I guess it's a little confusing when you use the term "game developer" when you're citing the salary of a game programmer.

The two terms are often used interchangeably.

Holy banana sauce...

I thought PC just got patches sooner was because it was an easier process than going through Microsoft/Sony's process.

how does world of warcraft release weekly patches..?

By not having a console version.

They also have a swimming pool filled with gold... the size of Texas.

I searched the first two pages to make sure I wasn't doing a Repost. Guess I shoulda checked all the forums

I bet the creators of NVEC are laughing their asses off.

And people are saying that PC gaming is dying out?

I don't know if you're already aware, but Zenimax is privately owned. So I'm not sure we'll find out even then .

When it comes to patches, 'bout the only relevant type of gamer developer is game programmers. The vast majority of bugs are in the code, so it takes a coder to fix them.

This.

Come to think of it, this is probably the very reason ActiBlizzard has repeatedly said that they will never release a console version of WoW.

world of warcraft simply would not work on a console for numerous reasons..i mean if you are going to compete you simply must have macros and i play wow in a semi hardcoe fashion, and let me tell you, i have literally hundreds of macros each with a specific, situational purpose, and i use them regularly in raids, all of them, on my priest and my hunter, less on my warrior bc warriors are pretty faceroll, but it still requires a lot of macro'ing..there just aren't that many buttons on a controller lol..even the simple 1-+ on the keyboard would be too much and that isn't even 1/3'rd of your spells. i just don't see how that'd work..i mean yeah if you wanted to just play as a gimp casual with no ability to play in a min/max fashion but that's not really the point, especially with wow..

i guess that explains why fable 2 never received a patch to fix the comatose spouse

And this is why we sowany ripped jeans before we sell them to people, and those people bring them back when the rip becomes a tear demanding it get a patch.

Is the 40k for the code to be implemented alone or does that include wages etc