@zerohero

I think the max sales for Uncharted are 2.5M, thats really pushing it. I would say 1.8-2M is far more likely.

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).

Misterd,

I agree. It's risky. But so is any game no matter what the game or budget. The risk is more magnified as a 3rd party. Sony has like 15 in house studios including ND. That money was there to further the install base of the PS3. Sony has put more money on its 1st party software than MS and Nintendo combined. So far, only 1 major bomb. It's a telling thing that the games division has turned a profit this early in the consoles launch. I know it wasn't all the PS3...... just the brand name in general.

True enough, but I was looking at it more from a 3rd party perspective (something I failed to make clear) as they are the ones who have decided the winner in almost every generation. I know if I were a small-medium sized publisher (ie not EA or Actiblizzard) the combination of development costs and user base would make me very wary of the PS3.

@ shams

no proof or links = false.

I'm not sure if this has been posted yet, but there was an article listing the average cost of PS3 games as $15 million.

So this was NOT a low budget game.

Now from what I heard, the production values of the game DID justify the cost, but this thread is a MAJOR spin.

EDIT: Okay, it was posted, but that shows this thread is BS. Uncharted got a lot of praise, but it was not low budget. 

I was just wondering.... what the cost to use Unreal engine 3?

Are you kidding. People here were saying that all PS3/360 games cost 40-60 Million.

Don't give me this, Oh wait, that really expensive. While it's a high number, it's a lot less than most say.

And being that Sony is the publisher (kitler!), there is no other cut taken from profit than the retailer cut.

Are you kidding now? "Most" people were not saying PS3 games cost that much. Not even a plurality were. Some were.

@shams, i highy doubt Red steel has shipped that many units, i have never even seen a red steel game in any store except blockbuster. And i'm sure we can agree that its not selling out with each shipment