Ubisoft wanted Splinter Cell: Blacklist to sell 5 million copies - only sold 2 million

[DarkFury]

Even though this is most likely an exercise in futility and lead into pointless arguments, I am still going to put my 0.2 cents in since people mentioned the data I posted on THQ budgets and profitablity:
First off, what I posted is not some random guesses: these were from the Bankruptcy filings by THQ itself, and if they don’t know about their own budgets and ROI, then no-one does. I trust the source, a noted game consult and analyst.

Next, obviously all of the Saints Row 4 120M+ was not spent on development. Marketing, corporate overhead (all those suits!), R&D… all the other costs on a title pile up very quickly as well. The bottom line is, THQ was looking to clear 55M for 181M$ sales on Saint’s Row, which means a vast majority of the money made disappears somewhere within the halls of the publisher. A lot of it will be the dev cost, but there are a lot of other money sinks it seems. In the end it makes no difference: either games are profitable or they are not. What proportion went into dev vs. other costs is not that relevant. Notice how they project to take a loss on 2.4M sales on Darksiders 2. That tells you something.

You just need to look at Square for validation of this. Despite their 3.5+M sales of the new Hitman, half of the team at IO was fired as thanks, and the Montreal outfit is now making mobile games instead of new console Hitman title. If the title was profitable, why would they do this?

I also noticed several people on this thread seem to think that the publisher gets the entire 60$ charged at retail. Distribution, manufacturing, and of course retail cut eat away at this very fast. We are also seeing games discounted aggressively earlier and earlier all the time.

Next, I agree that Sony has been much better about their budgets lately. I am very hopeful that they are going to do well this time around. They have to as well, profitability is now very important to Sony, their financials for the last few years have not been great. I am a long-term Sony gamer, so this is great news to me.

Let’s hope we see budgets brought under control this gen, as not all games can sell 5M copies. However, thus far budgets have been going up each gen. Let’s hope this gen bucks the trend!