Uncharted's budget was...

[shams]

krik said:

Uncharted's budget was $20M... I was pretty amazed too. Such an amazing game built from scratch (zero lines of code from PS2 days), new tool chain, lots of motion capture studio time, real actors, 1 year pre-production and 2 years production, custom sound track, etc. Sounds cheap for so many thing but the lead designer confirmed that $20M was all.

So all those naysayers that keep saying that PS3 games are too expensive can stop talking shit now ;)

PS: Lair was more expensive than $20M, rofl. Pretty ironic, Naughty Dog rocks.

WTF?

20m is an *extremely* expensive game. Note that this doesn't include advertising, marketing or promotion - does it?

Give me 20m, and three years and I could *definitely* deliver Uncharted - absolutely no doubt.

Its typical for marketing budget to match development budget - so 40m for the title in total. And even if Sony made $40 US "raw" per unit sold (and they wouldn't - be closer to $25..$30) - that's 1m units sold to break even.

Ouch. 

...

According to VG, its sold 1.21m - so it might *just* be hitting break even point. And if Uncharted struggles to break even / make a good profit - what does that say for the average PS3 developer?

(note - when you take into account shipments, its probably shipped 1.5m - 2.0m units...by profit per shipped unit is closer to $20-$25 / unit) 

Carnival games (not a great comparison really) has sold 1.1m.  As its one platform, I doubt dev cost + marketing exceeded 3-4m (definitely less than 10m).

If they make $20US per unit - that's 22m of revenue (based on sales - of course shipments are higher). 

...

And as for something like Mario Party 8... at almost 5m sales (6m shipped?), and considering its a Ninty published title - might be looking at 200m of revenue, on 10-15m dev + marketing costs (if not only 5m).