I've always known Star Ocean was never a big franchise.

[mrstickball]

Euphoria14 said:

mrstickball said:

60k opening for SO4 is a bomb? Provide me a link to SO3's first week sales in the US then. I'll gladly admit I'm wrong when you show me that. Otherwise, what games do we have from the PS2 mega-sales era that show exactly how their games had (or did not have) legs?

Now, for KZ2's budget:

• http://www.vg247.com/2008/02/27/killzone-2-budget-balloons-says-rumour/  - Reported 42m EUR budget
• http://threespeech.com/blog/2009/02/killzone-2s-ten-second-tv-teaser/  - 2 million pound UK advertising budget

Of course, I doubt what I've said will convince you. You already have it in your mind that KZ2 cost nothing, and was made for free by a love offering from Guerilla Games.

First off that link goes nowhere.

Second, did you just try to convince with a rumour?

I can dig up about 500 articles about Killzone 2's budget, but most are rumors. There are maybe a half-dozen games that have budgets that have been divuldged by their developer, since that info (like downloadable sales numbers) are kept under lock and key. So what do we have to go off of?

A few more:

• http://www.digitalbattle.com/2006/11/28/killzone-ps3-info/  - Site claims that as of November 2006, Killzone 2 already had 120+ staff working on production (pretty damning for a low-budget, no?). If GG never added a single employee to that list, and never spent a dime before that day, we come out with $28.8 million using a $10k/mo salary for the average employee. I'd say that's an absolute minimum baseline, but it's probably far more since work most likely began Nov 2006, and the employee size may have increased past the 120 people.
• Then we have the Surfer Girl rumor that stated that KZ2's budget went from $30m to $60m, and was going to miss the Fall 2008 timeframe (this was reported in early 2008): http://www.psxextreme.com/ps3-news/2503.html   She was right about the timeframe, I wonder if she was right about the dev costs too? Given the previous point about staffing, it may be plausible the budget was $50-60m

But we're getting off topic here. I still think it's hard to argue where SO4 will go after 1 week of NA, and 2 weeks of JP data. It could do very well, it could bomb. I think that this thread is somewhat premature, though.