I fear the game is selling poorly

Well what do you expect then the port to the one platform where this game would shine is so terrible?

My brother got the last copy at a Best Buy the other day.

I've seen this game front and center on gog.com since release. Within the first few days it got over 10 pages of reviews. It looks like the game is doing incredibly well on this front.

Just a correction: Steam takes 30%, not 40%. I'm not sure of how much GOG takes for every sale, but I imagine it's 30% as well.

I don't know, my math works out differently.

The 5.5 million would have been close to the original, full budget.

So let's say the game would have initially cost 6 million to make.

After the Kickstarter, they would have had around 2 to 3 million in funds left to put into the game (remember that Kickstarter fees and the funds for backer rewards are also taken from the money raised).

Let's be conservative and say 2 million. That would mean they needed the publisher to put up about 4 million to complete the game.

Now, the game suffered delays, which obviously increase the budget. That said, if we assume that most of the budget was eaten up by asset creation, then the budget increased caused by the delay was not substantial; what may have been substantial was the funds needed to bring WayForward on board.

Now, if WayForward's help cost them, say, another 2 million, that gives you a budget of about 8 or 9 million.

Thus, I doubt the budget went past 10 million... and then there's the marketing budget. However, what ArtPlay put up through the Kickstarter might make up for this, so that 505 might have ended up spending ballpark 10 million in total, maybe even a lot less (3 million from ArtPlay with a total budget of 7 million equals 4 million from 505).

So, 5 to 10 million is probably a good estimate of the money invested by 505, which means profitability just needs to exceed that amount.

The "free" DLC is cheap to produce, because it simply requires programmers and game designers, as opposed to anything asset related (which requires scores of artists).  Paid DLC is likely to come later, and this may be assumed to be priced to be profitable.

As for profits per sale, it's 70% for Steam and I would assume something like 80% for GOG - since Steam is the  market leader, you can be sure it charges more than GOG.

If the Steam version sells 200 k, that's about 5 million right there. If the budget was on the low end, then they've broken even on Steam sales alone; if the budget was on the high end, then they'd need to sell twice as much, which is a bit under the high-end estimate of initial Steam sales. 

We can't know how the sales on GOG relate to the sales on Steam, but it does seem like total sales on consoles would double the Steam numbers; and while profit per unit sold is likely less on consoles, that's still a substantial amount.

My guess is that the game won't lose money, and will very likely make a good deal of money.

I'm not as optimistic as purifyweirdshard  (though I'd love to be proven wrong), but I can easily see the game moving over a million units across all platforms over its lifetime. If the game weren't having issues on Switch, I'd be even more bullish about it.

That said, I wouldn't expect 505 to gloat or tout sales numbers until the Switch version is fixed; doing otherwise might be bad PR. So I expect the publisher to be quiet on sales for the time being, but maybe make noise about it after the Switch version is fixed, or before releasing a Game of the Year Edition further down the road.

Because if a game doesn't sell there's less possibility for a sequel or more content, or even just a new game from the same developer.

Let's not act like indie developers don't want to make any money as opposed to the greedy "cookie cutter" AAA titles. They want to be successful and we're not some kind of elite audience because we go against "the general crowd".

So happy to read it just climbed from the 200k-500k tier to the 500k-1M tier!

If Steamspy is to be believed and we go with the lowest number possible (500k) it must man that at least another 500k have been sold combining PS4, XB1 and Switch sales, right? This game must be past 1,000,000 copies sold right about now! But I'd figured we would've heard about it by now if that was the case so who knows? Maybe they're saving that announcement for later?