Ninja Theory: We made no money on PS3 with Heavenly Sword

Monday 29-Mar-2010 3:18 PM Developer reasons its multi-platform move with new title

"It's difficult. Heavenly Sword came out pretty early on the PS3, and we sold, I think, a million and a half copies, and that's still not enough as an independent studio to break even," said co-founder Tameem Antoniades.

"The publisher potentially breaks even at that point, but the developers don't," he added, and it's for this reason that the developer chose to go multi-platform with its latest upcoming quest, Enslaved.

"It's just that when so many people have Xbox - I mean over half the market or more has Xbox 360s - why limit yourself to one platform?" commented Antoniades.

You can catch the rest of the interview on CVG later today.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=240867

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What the... O_O

Anyone knows the budget?

They must have had quite a budget then O_o

No wonder the game is still full price at so many retailers after all these years.

that's really sad..

the game is 5 hours, and the budget was higher than MGS4s potentially.

Very sad

i bet these kind of stories are very common on hd systems, and we don't hear about half of them-- that is crazy a game can sell 1.5 mill and make a profit

Hmm IMHO they will have serious problem with selling 2M copies of Enslaved without the marketing hype of it being one of first PS3 exclusive games.

Well that's kinda insane. I suppose that's what you get when you pay for famous voice actors. Seriously Andy Serkis and Anna Torv? Then there is the fact that they're based in the UK at a time when we have no tax breaks for the industry.

That sounds like bad management.

Eh, more than twice as many people worked on MGS4, and it was in development twice as long... pretty sure it's budget likely dwarfed Heavenly Sword's.

Enslaved sounds very cool though - a bit of sneak action (with deliberately strong enemies) in a post apocalyptic (but very green/colorful) setting loosely based on "Journey to the West"

edit:

@ topic)

here in EU it went "Platinum" very fast and I guess that's where most of the sales come from, so that explains why they didn't break even on this project (which they began for XBox and then re-did for PS3 .. I asume a lot of dev time/costs went into it due to that)