Uncharted's budget was...

[shams]

phil said:

shams said:

 

You do realise that Red Steel has almost sold the same number of units as Uncharted? And that it has almost certaintly (being a launch title) shipped more units than Uncharted?

Ubisoft has made MORE money from Red Steel than Uncharted has made. And development/marketing cost almost half.

...

Uncharted is NOT a good example, if someone is trying to paint PS3 development in a positive light from a financial point of view. The best examples would be the cross platform titles (CoD & Assassins).

According to this very site, Uncharted has sold almost 20% more than Red Steel. The numbers here put revenue for Uncharted at 72 million (assumed cost = $60) and revenue for Red Steel at 46.8 million (assumed cost = $50 just to give Red Steel the benefit of the doubt here, it's only $20 on Amazon and I distinctly recall only paying $40 for it). Subtract money for the budgets of both games, Uncharted is at 52 million, which is more than Red Steel's entire total revenue. The idea that Red Steel has done vastly better for Ubisoft than Uncharted has for Naughty Dog/Sony is clearly not true.

Except that, this is quite wrong.

Firstly - you have to look at shipment figures - not sales figures. I stand by my claim that Red Steel shipped more units than Uncharted has - simple because its launch title. But this doesn't matter too much.

Secondly - total revenue is meaningless in this discussion. The only thing that matters is what retailers purchase 'shipped' units for.

I'll estimate these at (I have been briefly involved in the game distribution business):

 - Red Steel $23US

 - Uncharted $28US

The main advantage that Sony has here, is that production is a lot cheaper (as its "at cost") - I presume anyway. But this sort of skews figures, and much depends on which divisions take which chunk of the profit, whether Ubisoft got a "good deal" from Ninty for a big launch title, and so on.

Other costs (manu / shipping, boxed product) approx:

 - Red Steel $8US / unit

 - Uncharted $5US / unit 

So the estimated profit per unit shipped is something like this:

 - Red Steel $15

 - Uncharted $23

So using sold figures, we end up at:

 Publisher revenue

 - Red Steel: 1.04m x $15 = $15.6m

 - Uncharted: 1.21m x $23 =  $27.83m

My estimates for total shipments (so far) are closer to this:

 - Red Steel: 1.8m --> 1.8m x $15 = $27.0m

 - Uncharted: 1.7m --> 1.7m x $23 = $39.1m

 

And total costs including production AND marketing I would estimate at:

 - Red Steel: 20m (a lot of free promotion from Ninty as launch title, maybe even cross advertising)

 - Uncharted: 35m (huge amount of advertising, from the platform holder themselves - not a separate company - including as their big Xmas product in all territories)

Total profits:

 - Red Steel: 7.0m  

 - Uncharted: 4.1m 

I'm sure some of these figures are off, but they seem ballpark to me. Uncharted will no doubt continue to sell, and will end up doing a lot better than Red Steel - but thinking that the games are light years apart in profit is just wrong.

The big thing about Uncharted - is that Sony leveraged off it to help sell the PS3. Uncharted marketing IS  PS3 marketing (may even partially share the budgets). Ubisoft don't care/need to do that for the Wii (as they are not the platform holder).