Uncharted's budget was...

[windbane]

phil said:

shams said:

 

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).

That is almost 100% pure unadulterated speculation.  Not only that, it's incredibly biased: every you've highballed Red Steel and lowballed Uncharted.  Furthermore, you estimate Uncharted's advertising budget as over 50% of the production budget... then you go on and say that it was so incredibly large because Sony used it to sell PS3s.

This is absolutely silly.  First, if Sony was leveraging Uncharted, only a fool would put that in Uncharted's marketing budget and not the PS3 marketing budget.  Second, you actually don't know what that $20m figure includes.  It may very well include the cost of advertising.  You have no idea.  Without this little piece of knowledge, your whole post borders on pointless.

Well said. A lot of people seem to be ignoring the multiplatform aspect of this as well, in that most third party games are on both 360 and PS3 so the average cost per system will drop. I like how some of you guys on this site act like you know that developers can't make money developing for the PS3 and they just keep doing it because they are stupid. Wake up, they know what they are doing. Stop making up random numbers to prove your point. That's disgusting.