SOme people see too short term. Uncharted is already making money. By the end of this year and the next, the PS3 should at least triple(or more) its install base and a chunk of those will buy Uncharted. Gears didn't sell 5M copies day one..... it takes time. Or you also believe that the "4,000,000 new 360 owners in the past 6 months" are not going to buy Gears if War. Just like Gears, Uncharted is a must have for new PS3 owners.

Wasn't Halo 3 > 30M?

I wasn't (necessarily) suggesting that one game performed dramatically worse than the other, just that one of the main ways to measure the success of the game demonstrates greater performance from Red Steel ...

The main unanswered question with the analysis you provided is what were the expenses of marketing. My personal impression is that Red Steel had a much shorter campaign (a couple of weeks surrounding launch whereas Uncharted has had months of advertisements), Red Steel had worse spots (CSI reruns on spike as compared with primetime television on fox), and the quality of production on Red Steels advertisments was much lower. I don't think I could provide a decent estimate for the difference in total cost, but I do know that a national spot on a lesser channel like spike durring a less than ideal timeslot can be as little as 1% of the cost of a national primetime slot on a major network.

 I'm pretty sure it was 30million to make and an additional 30million for marketing.

Look ,I found something interesting for development budgets for Xbox 1 ,PS2 ,Cube ,DS ,GBA and PSP .

System Average Cost # of titles used in calculation
Xbox 202 million yen ($1.8 million) 13 titles
PlayStation 2 96 million yen ($877,634) 194 titles
GameCube 90 million yen ($822,857) 11 titles
PSP 90 million yen ($822,857) 6 titles
PlayStation 80 million yen ($731,429) 1 title
GBA 53 million yen ($484,571) 47 titles
DS 37 million yen ($338,286) 3 titles
Dreamcast 25 million yen ($228,571) 2 titles



And more info about development kits price :

Sony has cut the price of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) development kit by 50 percent in an effort to encourage more games.


PS3 development kits will now cost €7,500 (£5,400) in Europe

As my boy Del would say...

"We've had enough of the lackluster, trust us.

We get the kinda games you cant rent at blockbusters!

You didn't try to say that one game performed drastically worse than the other, but shams certainly did.  This is why I was keeping all of the old text in my replies ;)

I also don't know how much advertising for Uncharted was.  I am entirely unaware how long ad campaigns for either game were, as I avoid television wherever possible.  I don't know, and don't know enough about advertising that I'll speculate.

Del as in the Funky Homosapien?  Of "you gotta wash your ass" fame?

Well heres some useful info :

The software available for any console is crucial to its success. According to a report on the Bloomberg news service, developers may be thinking carefully about making games for the PlayStation 3 because of the number of sales required to put the projects in the black. Namco Bandai Holdings Inc. president Takeo Takasu has said in an interview that PS3 games must be a mass-market success. Games for the next-generation console cost an average of $8.6 million to create .


So ,8.6 million for a PS3 game .Then we have Killzone 2 with its 21 million budget of course .

I think Uncharted costed 10-12 million and it was marketed with some 8 million .Its marketing was far less apparent than Gears one year before .

 Isn't control supposed to be the thing that sets the wii apart? It also killed LAIR. If the controls don't do what you tell it,WTF good is it?!? It's a video game  reacts on input. If it can't translate that input into a believable solution... it gets old real quick!