Homefront hits store shelves in just a few days. The game faces a first person shooter market already saturated with a plethora of competition seeking to claim dominance. It seems, however, that Homefront is going to have to be more than just marginally successful in order to ensure its own future.

Paul Pucino, Executive Vice President and Cheif Financial Officer at THQ, recently revealed that most new IPs at THQ need to hit two million units sold to turn a profit:

"When you just think in terms or profitability, the owned IP, there's a threshold of break-even of about 2 million units per game, so you have to sell somewhere in the area of 2 million copies of a game like Homefront to break even. Once you get past that you're generating incremental operating margins as high as 60 per cent."

Homefront is already off to a good start. It is the most pre-ordered game in publisher THQ's history, claiming 200,000 copies pre-ordered in the US alone. This may pale in comparison to the success of reigning champion Call of Duty: Black Ops, recently dubbed the best selling game of all time by NPD Group, but it's a solid start for the new IP.

If Homefront manages to live up to the hype it's created for itself, Kaos Studios and THQ's plans to develop the game into a series can be realized. With Kaos Studios General Manager David Votypka hinting at a new gameplay-centric layer he wants to include in Homefront 2 (if it gets made), we can't help but hope that Homefront sells well, so that we might see more innovation driving this generation of first person shooters.

What do you think about THQ's revelation that just about any new IP would need to sell two million copies to be successful? Is this hindering new and interesting ideas in the video games industry?

Homefont will be released for PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and OnLive March 15, 2011. If its launch trailer doesn't get you in the mood to defend your homeland, we don't know what will.

Source: Industry Gamers, Eurogamer