Let’s talk Suikoden.

The Suikoden Revival Movement has made a lot of progress in bringing us to a world in which Suikoden games are more available via XBLA, Steam, or PSN. Despite the progress though, we have little evidence that Konami is actually moving forward with this plan.

So why not?

Well, Konami is a business, and for a business to do anything, it needs to see black on the bottom line.

But wouldn’t Suikoden be easy to port and make money from? That’s what everyone is asking themselves. How much money, exactly, is Konami going to have to make in order to justify a port?

Well, we can start with PSN, and the answer there should be somewhere close to “any”. Yes, since Playstation is fully backward compatible, the system should have no problem running the old code from the 90s. Just download and play. While I don’t know the split between publisher and platform for an online game over PSN, I know that it’s 70% publisher on XBLA, and I imagine it is something similar on PSN. In fact, I made my figures with the assumption that it is exactly 70%.

Suikoden 1 is currently on sale on PSN for $5.99. If Konami is getting 70% of that, that’s $4.19 per download. Unfortunately, though, efforts to get the sales figures for this game have been unsuccessful, and guessing wouldn’t get us anywhere.

So, the alternative is to try a different approach. Instead of focusing on PSN, in which the publisher has virtually no cost issues to overcome, we are going to imagine that Suikoden is being released on all platforms and is available to roughly everyone who wants it.

To estimate sales, we are going to look at Operation Rainfall’s successful re-release of Xenogears (and saga).

Within the first year of its release, Xenosaga has ~630,000 purchases. It’s tempting to assume a Suikoden release would receive the same warm welcome, but it’s a better idea to compare the initial sales figures of these two games first:

Suikoden had sales of ~600,000 in its day, while Xenogears had 1,460,000.

That means that Xenogears has roughly 2.4 the initial sales. That puts our horse at a significant disadvantage.

It now makes reasonable sense to take Xenosaga’s 630,000 and divide that by 2.4, equalling 262,250. Now we need to assume that the price across all platforms will be a steady $5.99 and that the publishers share will be uniform at 70%. We take our number of sales, 262,250 and multiply that by our publisher’s share per download, $4.19. This should give us $1,098,827.50

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$1,098,827.50

That is not a big number to a developer. Especially after they pay a programmer to actually complete the port(s). But that number would also continue to grow long after that first year has come and passed. It is my opinion that a million dollars profit (before removing the cost of a port) would be a number that Konami should look at and say, Yes, let’s do this.

 NOTE: If Suikoden is released cross platform, sales will likely be much higher than what we see for Xenosaga. I’ll have to do some dredging and comparing figures to adjust the numbers for each platform- I’ll try to get it done tomorrow!