I dont know how much people said the development costs for games were but I distinctly hearing people say "OMG ratchet and clank and Heavebly Sword flopped. No profit OMG" which take the 30 dollars per sales means the development costs have to be over 25mil

Neither of those likely have made a profit yet... unless Sony paid for a majority of there advertising. Avertising budget is the part you are missing. In America at least there was a time where you couldn't not see adds for Ratchet and Clank and HS.  Primetime adds are ghastly exensive.

Also, i'd put it more at around 24-25. That's about the average i've seen quoted for HD games. Even if you assume an average 30 Sony games see less profit per unit than 360 games for third party publishes. HD-DVD's cost more then Blu-Ray and Sony's licesing fees are more expensive.

Wow, just wow.

What? The advertising budgets are going to kill you as much as the Heavenly Sword and Ratchet and Clank adds played.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had some serious sony backing advertising wise though... the only other game i've seen advertised as much was Uncharted... and i've only seen one advertised more.

Halo 3.

I'd seen multiple adds for both games in primetime... a couple times a day. Not to mention at other times.

Primetime adds usually are going to run you 200,000 a pop. That kind of thing REALLY adds up.

Non-primetime can still be 100,000K. 

That's not even counting what it costs to make the commercial... and what it costs to run the focus groups to make sure the commercial you made actually works.

haha okay. you keep thinking there butch. that's what your good at.

Everyone is forgetting one thing here, rentals. Companies like Blockbuster can buy a few copies of a game and rent it out for over a year easily and make lots of money off of it. I have a VERY hard time believing that devs don't get a cut of that.

Also, as has been mentioned but ignored, not all games are going to cost this much and have this much marketing so making profits wouldn't be nearly as hard. Add into it that, again this part was mainly ignored, they built the game from the ground up, when they release Uncharted 2, the development cost will be less, with a larger install base, equals more money to be made.

What? That is how much advertising costs.  You can look it up.

It's a very expensive buisness. How many adds did you see for Ratchet and Clank a day when it was out? I'd guess.... a whole whole lot. Which is why I imagine Sony had to foot a signficant amount of that bill.

Look at games like COD4. You didn't really start seeing COD4 adds till after the game started selling.

Its more a matter of accounting than anything else.

Does Sony have a "PS3" marketing budget? Is there separated into "per game" and "platform" - or is it all rolled into one?

I was only trying to do it in a way that made any form of comparison fair - you could realistically say that the entire "Uncharted" advertising budget was part of the PS3 budget - so "0" dollars were spent on directly advertising Uncharted. Is this fair?

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But then - what happens to the PS3 advertising budget in general? Is it money that has to be "covered" - or just magically appears from some department?

One thing I know - the $20m figure does NOT cover advertising. Absolutely no way. Its never part of the development budget, and is never treated that way.

The main reason for this, is that *most* advertising is done AFTER development wraps up (or bulk of dev wraps up, and game is in QA/production). Its also a moving target - they keep spending money advertising it (magazines, posters, TV, etc..) every month.

This is why for a company like Sony, they DON'T break the figures down per title - its just per division. They will know if revenue has covered development cost (i.e. $20m) - but they won't as easily know if its covered this PLUS advertising/marketing.

(what happens if two or three games get advertised in the one TV spot? What about cross advertising with other media, such as movies or music?).

Its a lot simpler for Ubisoft - they are likely to have had a specific advertising budget for the game, which is in addition to the development cost.

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I would say that without more specific information, this entire THREAD is pointless. No shipment figure for Uncharted, no manufacturing cost figures, no advertising figures. 

The only thing that can be deduced, is that development was expensive - and generally a lot more expensive than for other consoles. 

You most certainly were NOT trying to make the comparison fair, otherwise you wouldn't have said that the sold vs shipped differential for Red Steel is double that for Uncharted, a lame guess if I ever heard on.

As for PS3 vs Uncharted advertising, it depends.  If a commercial was used to push PS3 as opposed to Uncharted, eg. it happened to show Uncharted in addition to other PS3 material, then that most certainly would fall under the category of PS3 advertising.  Unless you want to count every last Nintendo commercial that just happens to mention Red Steel against Red Steel's budget.   Additionally, we don't actually know if the $20 million was the development budget... only thing that we know is that it was the "budget."  But, for the sake of argument let's assume that you're right and advertising isn't accounted for in that figure, $15m for advertising is still a ridiculous assumption, whether you care to admit it or not.

Another thing you're ignoring is that, since this whole development cost thing boils down to whether or not 3rd partys are going to develop for a system or not, if Sony is willing to subsidize the advertising on a big budget title, which is highly likely since these games move units, then dev studios won't really pay too much attention to that.

Of course development on the PS3 is more expensive than consoles that aren't the graphical powerhouses... and the Wii costs more to develop for than the Nintendo 64, which cost more to develop for than the Atari 2600, what's your point?  PS3 development costs are in line with those of the 360.  Seeing as to how, realistically, that's all the PS3 can compete with, then that's all that really matters.

There's no way Uncharted made profit, even if it reached 2 million. You don't even know how much distribution, retailers, etc.. take away from the game's profits.

 Usually a developer makes only $10 from each copy, and if you add more $10 from game's royalties to Sony, they only make that much, $20 per copy. And adding whatever additional costs they had such as advertisement, makes it either no profit or almost no profit. Either way, it counts as a failure.