The "Official Online Naughty Dog Store" Thread!

[Romeo]

Originally Posted by Fad

Yes, it all comes down to how the collectible came to be. In some cases, they are made as a gift for the dev team to celebrate the completion of a game. Other times, it's a promotional item for the media. However, obviously there is a big difference in the development cost between an OEM product like a sports bottle with a game logo on it, and a custom sculpted collectible statue. In some cases, when the collectible is meant for a "Collectors Edition", you can amortize the development cost over the 50K units you're going to make. But when you make something like a Delsin statue which can cost upwards of $10-20K to sculpt, mold, make tooling and paint masters for, and the per unit cost can be $50-100 ea because you're making such a low number, you can't just make 50 pcs for the press or 100 pcs for the game team and call it a day because that would be one helluva expensive promo item. ;-) (BTW, I'm purposely being vague on my costs). So, in order to offset some of these costs and see what the demand would be, I decided to make some extra and sell them at a few events like PAX East. My deal with Marketing was that they got to use them for the press and contests first, but I did mark the numbered version differently than their promo/internal team version.

So, while you may see an old promo item pop up on the ND store, Treehouse, ND and I will also be hard at work on new items, so keep the ideas coming.

Thanks,

Gary

I'm glad and very appreciative that you explained it so thoroughly for the community. It's something that so many just simply don't understand: economics. It may very well cost $10,000 to design and manufacturer a small bust, and unless the company plans on writing off the cost for whatever reason such as press, they would surely need to recoup their costs back by either charging an exorbitant price per unit or create a large quantity at a lower price per unit.