We don't know how much Nintendo made from the GC. They made a lot of money in that gen because of the GameBoy.

Yea, why appeal to your core fanbase.  You know, the guys who got the franchise to be popular to begin with, giving you enough sales form the start to do sequels.  And then stuck around for the first 3 or 4.  Yea, fuck those guys. 

Especially when you consider that most of the engine and assests were refined for the 3rd one.  So if you said both games cost that much (including marketing), I might believe you.  But not the 4th one by itself. 

Don't worry about Sony's 1st party games. I mean, God of War III, Uncharted 2/3 and LittleBigPlanet all sold 5-6m. GT5 sold 10m+. That's 5 huge 1st party games right there and The Last of Us is also going to sell 5-6m. Then you have all the 2-4m sellers like Killzone 2/3, Infamous, Uncharted 1, Heavy Rain, LBP2, GT6, Motorstorm, Resistance 1/2 etc.

Most video games don't need to sell as much as you think to break even or make profit. Take God of War: Ascension for example, it cost about the same to develop as God of War III at $44 million (total budget) and even though it sold about 2m by the end of December 2013, which is only half as much as God of War III achieved in the same amount of time, it still made all its money back and then some.

Look at this GFK data for European software sales and revenue from January to June 2013: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=668021

As you can see in the case of Sony's God of War: Ascension it made over $35 million by June in Europe alone, when you consider that it sold twice as much in the US and then factor in Japan and the rest of the world it made roughly $130 million by June 2013 and only cost Sony around $40 million. If you fast forward to December 2013 it's now sold roughly 2m and made $170m+ or around $130m+ in profit. I don't know how much of the revenue Sony actually get but I'm guessing it's a good majority of it and they are making a heck of a lot of money.

So if even God of War: Ascension made that much money just imagine how much all the really big 5/6m+ exclusive games made? The 2-4 million sellers are making huge money and Sony has plenty of those as well as all their 1m+ sellers like Heavenly Sword, Infamous 2, Resistance 3, Beyond Two Souls, Ratchet & Clank games etc. So again, don't worry about Sony's 1st party, they are doing brilliantly and will only go from strength to strength on the PS4.

Shame about the Splinter Cell series, I loved Chaos Theory but Double Agent and Conviction just wern't that good and so I never even tried Blacklist.

Oh really? Thanks for the tip. How long is it though? If it's not that long, I might as well play it. And there's really absolutely no story, or is the story just paper thin?

I think you're underestimating the amount of money SONY makes on a 1st party sale and overestimating the cost of getting a game out of a store and into the hands of a consumer. Look at Heavy Rain for example. that was a well marketted game with AAA production value. Development and marketting are the too biggest chunks of the budget and in total that was just over $52M for SONY. They only spent about $30.4M on the ads and that was a very well advertised game by SONY standards. The game hasn't even hit 3M yet it's put out $180M+ $130M+ in revenue for SONY.  Killzone did significanly better sales wise and Gran Turismo 5 sold at least 5-6M at full price. 

On top of the money the make on first party, you've got third party royalty fees that help them out. The bulk of Playstation's financial woes are really just tied to hardware sales. Selling a console and praying for a strong attach ratio in the early years to keep you financially healthy just isn't an awesome business model. SONY and Microsoft have proven that on a number of occassions now. 

A lot of these 3rd parties like Rockstar and THQ are operating really inefficiently or doing something else seriously wrong.  You would think they would be much more strict about this seeing as they make less than a first party publisher with each sale. I'm still trying to wrap my head around Modern Warfare2 costing Activision $40M+ in development alone. Then you have these summer blockbuster movie industry styled marketting strategies with costs in the 100s of millions to get their games featured in a commercial every 5-10mins and featured on cans for multiple brands of soda. It's not even optional. They've got to do this to make sure the game sells and actually makes up it's already crazy cost.

EDITED

It's too bad. The game was phenomenal. Best SC since chaos theory.

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!

Either way or another, it´s an unsustainable situation. If a franchise is only manageable if it sells more than 5 million, a number that very, very few games achieve, then someone is not  paying attention to the signs of the market.  The AAA paradigm is not sustainable anymore

While not incredibly accurate you should still look at the US pre-order chart.

But it's correct that IF (which I don't think) it wont score that high it's going to flop sales-wise.