Uncharted's budget was...

[ChichiriMuyo]

HappySqurriel said:

Zero Hero said:
Misterd,

Are you assuming that Uncharted's sales are done as of today? It was a first year PS3 title. Uncharted will hit at least 5M lifetime total. And even at reduced prices due to "Greatest Hits" status, it was investment worth making. Devs know when they have a great game or not. Releasing bad games is more due to deadlines than the "We can do no more with it" attitude.

Besides the (obvious) unusual cases (like Brain Training) can you name a single game that sold more than 50% of its total sales after it had been on the market for 6 Months without being bundled?

Certainly, if it was a focus of Sony to build a brand and they pushed it hard I could see Uncharted passing 2 Million units but making a claim like 5 Million seems insane given its current performance. Basically, it is about as likely for Metroid Prime 3 to pass 10 Million as it is for Uncharted to pass 5 Million.

Well now that's ridiculous.  Uncharted is selling much more than MP3 each week at this point, and has passed its total sales already.  And though MP3 hasn't seen release in Japan yet, if the last two releases are any indication of how well it'd do there then Uncharted would be able to cover the games lifetime Japanese sales within 1-2 weeks at its current sell-through volume.  Uncharted also has a much better chance of being packed-in with the system (not a "buy the system, pick a 1st party game" bundle, but actually putting the game inside the box) than MP3 does (and heck, obviously it has a better chance of any sort of bundle), will get a boost when its inevitable sequel arrives while the Prime series is basically done, and since it's already a better seller world-wide it'd probably stand to gain more from a greatest hits release (not to mention the price change would be more drastic, making it seem like a better value).  Yeah, it's not too likely that Uncharted will hit 5 million (2.5 is quite easily possible), but that is significantly more likely a possibility than Metroid Prime even hitting 5 million, let alone 10.

Also, why do I get this feeling a lot of people think these companies don't get money when their games are packed in?  You think when a bundled game is sold that the company just gives them away?  This is business, not charity, and you can be guarenteed that when MS sold 1-2 million copies of Marvel Ultimate Alliance with 360's that Activision got a fairly large chunk of change for it.  Really, I've even seen people on here speak as if the copies of MUA sold with the 360 were "lying in a warehouse unsold," which is just about the dumbest thing I've heard in my life.  Undoubtedly MS said "can we pay you X to make Y copies of your game to sell with our system?" and Activision said "Yes, that is $Z additional profit on a game that paid for itself a year ago.  We'd be happy to help."