Half a million dollars per week? What were they doing? Running their backend on gold-plated servers? No, seriously, how can you run so high with a digital distribution model? You are not even printing the stuff!!!
Probably stuff like sending people to Florida to cover a campaign, sending people to Cupertino to cover the iPad mini, sending people to Geneva to cover the Higgs discovery played more into the expense.
120 staff. If the average wage was up around 80k+ with overheads you get a lot of the way there. Then you have fixed costs of office and the cost of actually reporting. Doesn't really surprise me at all.
They should take note that game apps haven't been sustainable on anything near that bloated an operation either.
If they were trying to run it on a much more modest staff, say 20, they would be profitable.
