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Madden Videogames - The New Wheaties Box?
Thanks to Slate for their article discussing the Madden football game series' enormous popularity. The article suggests: "To a new generation of football players, landing on the cover of the latest version of the game is a career-defining experience, the way an enormous shoe contract, or the Wheaties box, or the cover of Sports Illustrated once determined which sports stars had hit the big time." It also points out that "In the last two years, only the Grand Theft Auto games sold more copies than Madden", and Wired News are also running a story on the Madden franchise, which debuts its 2004 version this week, and was recently voted into the Pro Football Hall Of Fame.
IIRC, Madden (well, his company, Goal Line) makes around $10 in royalties for every copy sold new ($5 for the classic editions which retail for $20).
He makes about $3 million a year from ABC for MNF (plus the expenses of the Madden Cruiser); not bad for less than 100 hours of work a year (He does 18.33 broadcasts per year (17 regular season games, 1 playoff, and every third Super Bowl) with a normal length of 3 hours.
Endorsements aren't as lucrative as they were (when he was on CBS, he was one of the top endorsers out there), but probably good for about a million a year.
Royalties from EA probably come to another $5 million a year.