where on earth did you get that idea? demons souls would have been profitable at 175000 us copies sold.
this game made a mint.
What? 175,000 copies would have made it a profit?!!? Or, under 1 million at the most in total, when considering other regions sales. That doesn't make sense when you look at other developers and publishers' numbers. They made games with budgets that needed 5+ million sales to please them, while a game that is leagues ahead of those games in terms of quality, quantity cost far less?
Demons Souls and Dark Souls are the best games of the generation, has tons of content, and, relatively, didn't cost much money to make it seems. So, if quality like this can be made at such budgets, and get a decent profit (Or so it seems.), what's wrong with the industry? It doesn't just seem to be inefficiency/related things, it seems much more like an extreme amount of the budgets go to executives wages or whatever.
I just really, really hope they stick with the formula that made the previous games successful, and their current publisher, or other publishers don't massively increase the budget to fit unnecessary, immersion breaking cutscenes, QTE's, etc. in the games.