[lifeformed]

Of course Black Ops 2 made way more money than Minecraft, but if you look at ROI, Minecraft is far more impressive. Black Ops 2 may have made over $1 billion in revenue, but it cost about $250 million to make/market. Once you factor in the high cost of retail distribution, you get an ROI of around 300-350%. That's pretty good for a AAA game, but Minecraft cost next to nothing to make. The costs were pretty much just whatever it took to support a couple of developers; no marketing budget or anything. A ballpark estimate is that it took about $300-500k to make Minecraft into the alpha build that made $30 million. They put more money into it since then, but now it's around $85 million in revenue. That's like 8,000-10,000% ROI.

Of course Minecraft's success is an outlier, but it's not unreasonable to replicate a 4:1 ROI with an indie game. Investing a quarter billion dollars to make back $1-2B is such a huge risk. Dropping $100k into a tiny project that could make back $500k-$1M seems much safer.