I summon a large wall of roadblocks!(aka wall of text)
We need to keep in mind that just because other mainstream games are making 100+ million sales and hundreds of millions of dollars, does not mean a game is only successful then.
Back when I was studying Game Art & Design in Vancouver, BC, several teachers agreed that a AAA title's budget started (at least) at $10,000,000.00 USD. Sure, many many AAA titles go way above that, the money CoD, Halo or GTA spend in marketing alone would produce several stand alone titles, but that's because their target sales are even higher.If a PC game sells 200,000 units at $50 or $60 a pop, then it pays for itself. Many, many PC title sare made for less than the above figures, and thats why expansions and DLC's help.
And....
1)No, Relic is not a multibillion dollar company like blizzard, or infinityward or now treyarch, but it makes a profit to keep itself in business. Considering the amount of small and medium studios that die every year (there are very many, some we have never even heard of, people in the business will know), Relic has kept alive in some of the Game industry's darkest moments.
2)Relic DOES have a talented team of people. Yes, a lot of its personnel may have left to other opportunities, but in the game's industry that is NOT uncommon at all. Sure, not all of their games have made us cry from joy, but then again, what company has? Even Blizzard and Valve, once untouchable giants, have received frowns from its fans.
First a AAA game on PC should cost well above $10M. Assuming the COH2 team is 50 people (typical AAA games are 100 people) and their fully loaded cost is $100K on average and it takes 2 years, the total development cost would at a minimum $10M and probably closer to $20M. However this is just dev cost and not including marketing costs and also corporate overhead. The probable minimum total cost including overhead and marketing would be closer to $30M-$40M.
So lets take a scenario where you sell 1M copies. Let's assume the is ASP is $60 and all games are sold through Steam or retail. In either case, they take -30% cut as the distributor. So if you sell 1M copies at $60, the gross revenue is $60M, but the net revenue after steam cost is $42M. This of course assumes all games sold at full price which is generally not the case.
If you compare the $42M net revenue vs. full total cost which is probably closer to $40M, then in a scenario where you sell just 1M copies its basically a "breakeven" proposition.
To further colloborate this estimate, if also look at the internal documents from THQ's bankruptcy filing, they are predicting COH2 sells 2.0M copies, generate a net revenue of $56M, and estimate contribution profit of $15M. This implies the ASP of the game would be $28 (much lower than the $42 in my estimate). The lower ASP is probably due to discounts, etc. Also, then if you look at the contribution profit estimate of $15M vs. the revenue of $56M, this implies a total cost of $41M. This cost is similar to my estimate above.
The bottom line here is that a for a ship-once AAA PC game, a 2M unit seller is marginally profitable.
In terms of real money makers, the best example of a "strategy" game that is doing huge numbers is League of Legends. LoL doesn't sell anything upfront, rather its all done through item sales. LoL (which is owned by Tencent) is doing an estimated $300-400M of revenue PER YEAR. Not one time, but each year and growing. The F2P item model can sustain itself much much longer than a ship once client sale. That's why Relic also wants to add some microtransaction elements to COH2.
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
