How many units must a game sell to be considered a success?

[Bojay1997]

A friend of mine and I are having this argument over how many units a game needs to sell in order to be considered a successful game. I'm not talking best seller, but more of a financial success. I think it's around 300,000 or so, but he claims anything that sold less than 1 Million units is a failure, which I think is preposterous.

Anyone have any general ideas on what a reasonable number might be?

It all depends on the budget, publisher, developer, marketing, etc...A game developed by a small team over a period of a year or so that only cost a few hundred thousand dollars to make and had very limited marketing would be a massive success if it sold 300K copies. A game with a budget of millions of dollars that took years to develop and had a huge marketing budget but only sold 300K copies would be a huge disaster. There is no such thing as a break even point rule for games given the wide variation in production, distribution and marketing costs.