"and Metacritic score"

LOL. Idiots. Every site now brown noses publishers in order to get access to review their games. A metacritic score is utterly worthless. How about analysing the actual market and potential audience? No wonder they are hemorrhaging money.

I don't think that is right.  Tomb Raider would need to be at least 4 million in the chart for that to be true.  It doesn't make sense for it to be lower than Hitman either given the expected range for both games.  Looking at it another way, 3.4 is only 68% of 5, or 57% of 6, which doesn't match up with the percentages in the text.

It seems to me like those numbers in the chart are the estimated number of games sold to retailers by the end of FY13, which ended March 31st.

More likely is that range given already had the 80-90% baked in.  For example, 5.5 x 0.8 = 4.4 and 5.5 x 0.9 = 4.95.  That is pretty close to the 4.5 to 5 range that is given for Hitman.  The chart is basically showing how badly each title missed its prediction.  Otherwise that chart isn't really telling us anything.

Of course, the whole thing is worded pretty badly, so I could be wrong.

Well forcast, as in the sales forcasts that they use to set the companies financial forcasts on, not necesserily the game budgets themselves. Which makes their sales forcasts for the three titles even more insane as the actual sales potential that they were targeting for the games in that quarter to be 10-20% higher than their already excessive forcasts. 

At least that's how I read it.

Tomb Raider had about 100 people working on it (roughly counted in the credits). At an average wage of 70k and a dev time of 3 years, the game should have cost 21 million (Which is roughly what Uncharted 2 cost). 3.5 million copies, even at 30 dollar profit, that's 105 million Square should have made off of Tomb Raider in revenue... 85 million in profit, did I screw up somewhere?

LOL, so Squeenix blames the three best games they've published over the past year for their losses?

Hey guys, you SURE all those losses incurred aren't coming from all the money you spent on that tech demo that you've shown twice already?

licensing (middleware and tools, music, console development), equipment (PCs, furnature etc), building up keep (lease, utilities etc), outsourcing, Benefits (insurance, health plan etc), the game was in development for over 4 years (tho the first 2 were likely preproduction with a small team of 10-50), and the big one marketing. Total buget is probably $80m+.

So like, I recently bought FF13, my first FF game since FFX2....And man, the combat system was shitty, and the story wasn't as interesting as FFX's, which made's FFX2 at least interesting. The characters in FF13 were meh, and once again, the combat system was terrible, it felt as if the game was playing itself and I would only need to stop to use a potion every now and then.

Except, there is so much competition, that no only are you driven to have to pay for server demands of MMOs, you have to have people play free.  Even World of Warcraft is doing this.  Star Wars is doing this.  If they are all switching to play for free and micropayment, then getting several hundred thousands to pay regularly is really pushing it also, and not a lock.

when calculating wages there is alot more too it. Payroll tax, insurance, and regulation the city/state/country may have. Its hard to just estimate a cost like that. you need more facts. Where does the 70k avg salary come from?

How about following the Stellar Stone (Big Rigs Over the Road Racing) business model of bloated American management and cheap Russian coders?