Well, if you spent a huge amount of money to make sth, you have spent your money. If you don't sell your product you money will be gone. Usually ppl found small companies to limit their losses. Those will likely go into liquidation.LVUER wrote:How's if the doujinshi didn't sell well? Will the guys go bankrupt, since selling for 10,000 copies is not an easy task (or it is?)
Two years ago I was considering to write and publish my own book. You can get copies of your own book, so you wouldn't need a publisher. At this time it was about 7000 Euro for iirc 1000 copies. It depends on number of pages, type of cover and if you want colour prints in the book/cover. You can look up their internet sites for prices.
Even if a publisher - in any industry - grabs most of the money for themselves, they can do one thing which a private person usually can not: advertise the product BIG! to get it sold.
An one page andvert in a magazine alone may cost a few thousand Euro depending on the popularity of this magazine. iirc Konami spent about $8 million to advertise "Metal Gear Solid 1" o_0 (numbers are on the wikipedia pages)
Some ppl believe that on the WWW they can do their own advertisement. Well, I guess looking at the sites e.g. of Ren'Py game makers gives - at least me - the impression that there is no big money making involved.
I work with an amateur team who make PC games. Games were advertised and offered on several German and English game sites. I do not mean to discourage anyone but they didn't even sell more then 10 downloads of their last two games. Ppl need to know about your product. A webpage alone will not attract enough ppl that might be interested for your type of product.
Commercial games are usually announced years before their are released to be known and to create huge expectations in the gamers: Gothic, Crysis, God of War. Crytek had a budget of €16 million for "Crysis" . The number employees exploded from 60 for "Far Cry" to over 120. They even relocated their studio into another city...
Similar to the (absurd) music CD "loudness war" potential customers obviously react mainly to the product which is "hammered" most "loudly" into their brains by advertisement. So add advertisement to your production costs.