An expression for the extrapolated fusion gain G = Pfusion/5Pheat (Pfusion being the total fusion power and Pheat the total heating power) of ITER in terms of the confinement improvement factor (H) and the normalized beta (βN) is derived in this paper. It is shown that an increase in normalized beta can be expected to have a negative or neutral influence on G depending on the chosen confinement scaling law. Figures of merit like should be used with care, since large values of this quantity do not guarantee high values of G, and might not be attainable with the heating power installed on ITER.