Neither of us has inside knowledge. We can only speculate based on numbers found on the interweb. Nevertheless I think you got several things wrong.
nice numbers but far from making HUGE amounts of money on the project
a 1) German salaries are high
b 2) they were working on the game for 4 years - team of 16-20 people
c Take a normal programmer monthly salary in Germany - 4000 Euro/month
d Now for the taxing you will still have to pay something to the state - 25%
e Now multiply this 48x as they have been developing the game for 4 years and then 16x.
f 3 840 000/euro - salaries.
a) Compared to the Czech Rep. yes. But German developers (reportedly) earn clearly less than their colleagues in North America.
b) Early 2003 - Oct. 2006, until Aug. 2003 with a small team due to the work on the G2 add-on. IMHO it would be safer to calculate with 3.5 years and 17 people, then add a flat fee for the outsourced work they´ve certainly ordered.
c) I´ve read many statements by studio heads and developers hinting that the
average for a developer is much lower. An older survey can be found in the Google cache.
d) I´ve heard numbers of 5k per head per month on average including everything. Let´s make it 5.5k and include licenses, rent, taxes, etc.
e) Let´s multiply it with 42*17
f) = almost 4M. Now add 2M costs for sound track, outsourced graphics, licenses like speed tree & 3D Studio, Marketing, etc.
This makes it 6 M costs for the project. (The latest number I´ve heard is 6 to 7 Mill. EUR = 7.9-9.2M $)
Then you have to pay for HW, SW all the technologies, rents etc.
Already included.
Normally for a developer like this salaries make about 60-70% of the total costs. So the total costs of PB for their 4 years of existence could be around 6 500 000/euro.
The first sounds reasonable but maybe a bit low. The second is incorrect. PB already shipped G2 & NotR after their MBO. The funding costs, equipment and standard licenses (except upgrades) have certainly been budgeted for G2 Gold.
Jowood will be taking a huge amount of the 25-30 Euro mark - for marketing and publishing purposes.
That would be probably make 10 euro per game for PB - so PB will probably gain something around 5 000 000 Euro for the game - this number will only barely pay for all of their expenses. And I really think that G3 is still a loss-project. The datadisk might turn things around though. As well as the silver versions and such.
You are probably (I´m actually quite sure but I can´t prove it.
) under mistaken assumptions about the business model. Please refer to the contract on a different game posted in full on Gamasutra a few weeks ago.
First of all their is no "JoWooD" when talking about Gothic 3. Replace it with "JoWooD and Koch Media". KM´s label Deep Silver is Co-publisher and Koch invested significantly into the development of last year´s JoWooD line-up.
Secondly, JoWooD changed from a finished goods business model to licenses. This means the local publisher / distributor gets a bigger piece of the cake and in return has to shoulder the risks of distribution, returns and price protection. Further risk minimisation includes upfront payment upon delivery of the gold master.
To what extend this general shift of business model was applied to G3 is unknown.
Thirdly, JoWooD & Koch Media funded the whole game. PB probably signed an "advance against royalties" contract including milestone payment. A rough explanation would be that PB already have their money but the publishers get their investment back before PB can dream of actually receiving royalties.
It would certainly be better if PB was able to invest their own money into the project, I doubt they really did this though.
Which "25-30" EUR?
The average retail price should be close to 40 EUR incl. VAT. More in Germany, even more for the CE, less in other countries.
Marketing was already budgeted above. If we assume that after selling to wholesale and subtracting 2-5 EUR COGs (cost of goods, actual manufacturing and whatever else the contract says
) 20 EUR per unit can be shared between JoWooD, Koch Media and PB, this is a sum of 10M EUR. Deduct 7M as explained above. Then you have 3M profit before taxes to be split as per the contract. And counting.
Other sources of income:
Ongoing full price sales, mid price sales, add-on, Gold Ed., budget sales, budged add-on, budget G.Ed., cover mounts, sound track, merchandize (posters, etc.). Everything except the add-on doesn´t require further significant funding - and the add-on will be cheap compared to G3. Furthermore Koch Media is a wholesaler with close to 100% market penetration in DACH and solid access in F,I and UK, while PB (indirectly) and Koch run their own online shops. Both increases the profit per unit sold through these channels.
An analyst close to JoWooD wrote after the 350k announcement a few months ago that the project G3 was easily beyond the break even at 350k.
. Maybe a really silly death like tripping over a meat bug and falling to his death or becoming one with the for... umm... Innos or something spectacular like blowing himself up similar to the end of part 1 at least. After giving us so many hours of fun in part 1 and 2, he deserves a much better "funeral" than the totally lame ending of part 3 IMHO 
