Fisher designs, develops and sells many PC games. Games have a short lifecycle lasting around three years only.

Performance of the games is measured by reference to the profits made in each of the expected three years of popularity. Fisher accepts a net profit of 35% of turnover as reasonable. A rate of contribution (sales price less variable cost) of 75% is also considered acceptable.

Fisher has a large centralised development department which carries out all the design work before it passes the completed game to the sales and distribution department to market and distribute the product.

Fisher has developed a brand new game called Stealth and this has the following budgeted performance figures.

The selling price of Stealth will be a constant 30 per game. Analysis of the costs show that at a volume of 10,000 units a total cost of 130,000 is expected. However at a volume of 14,000 units a total cost of 150,000 is expected. If volumes exceed 15,000 units the fixed costs will increase by 50%.

Stealth's budgeted volumes are as follows:

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Sales volume

8,000 units

16,000 units

4,000 units

In addition, marketing costs for Stealth will be 60,000 in year one and 40,000 in year two. Design and development costs are all incurred before the game is launched and has cost 300,000 for Stealth. These costs are written off to the income statement as incurred (ie before year 1 above).

Required:

1. Explain the principles behind lifecycle costing and briefly state why Fisher in particular should consider these lifecycle principles.
2. Produce the budgeted results for the game 'Stealth' and briefly assess the game's expected performance, taking into account the whole lifecycle of the game.
3. Explain why incremental budgeting is a common method of budgeting and outline the main problems with such an approach.
4. Discuss the extent to which a meaningful standard cost can be set for games produced by Fisher. You should consider each of the cost classifications mentioned above.