It’s not that often you hear game creators flatly, publicly stating just how much a game needs to sell in order for them to recoup their development costs. Previously, we’ve seen Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning explain how many copies of their latest games have to sell in order for them to become profitable, and thereby fund new potential games.

Now, in a new developer diary from Hellblade developer Ninja Theory, we’ve learned that the studio’s upcoming action adventure game has to sell at least 200,000-300,000 units, in order for the independent studio to make it into the black.

The reasoning behind this is that only about a dozen individuals are working on Hellblade at Ninja Theory, and that development is focused on something very specific—in the case of this game, combat.

Ninja Theory is also promising that the current team will not grow above 15%, meaning they’d at most hire only a few new hands—you don’t want them to go over budget, do you? Despite their micro-managing of the budget, they’re still using expensive tech like mo-cap, which they’re reportedly trying to use in new ways so that the tech is more cost-effective.