[johnnyanmac]

I'm ambivalent. Especially in my domain of games where sharing the financial breakdown can indeed help those "wrong" kind of people realize how little money there is in non-AAA games once all the cuts come in.

So instead they make up shaky heuristics, see reviews and wishlists and must think "wow that game made a lot of money"... missing important context on how much was spent on labor/profit splits, or the area the team is in. Which muddies discussion on what a "successful" game even is (a topic already muddy even with all context).

BUT, then again the tides have shifted so much in that people just take a "should have" approach. "you shouldn't have done it in X genre. You shouldn't have used Y software. Your game sucks so it obviously failed". So maybe bringing up any finances will always attract that crowd, not cause them to look into another place to make money.

[ozim]

There is a lot of that just like people think opening pizza place is a great business - if they look only cost of wheat and water, cheese; it sounds like god knows what margins are there, $1 ingredients and sell for $20. In reality margins are much lower and if you don’t have a good spot you probably will loose money.