All that cash invested for only six months of exclusivity?

A year at least.

You don't know how much they paid for the exclusivity. Also this is Square Enix we are talking about, they aren't going to screw over Sony like that with 1+ year exclusivity. Plants vs Zombies which was also a timed exclusive on Xbox One, was around 6 months. Also, the source of this rumor is known to know things about Square Enix.

I wonder if Sony moved uc4 purposely to hurt tomb raider sales

That's shorter than I thought. Microsoft is going to have to advertise the hell out of Tomb Raider if they want the effect they desired.

UC4 got delayed for

1. Your point. Or

2. Horizon is coming this fall and no cannibalizing sales. Or

3. They really needed extra months to polish the game.

Its not about tomb raider. Its something else. In 2014 December event Sony and ND were confident about fall 2015 release. Something must have happened. Otherwise Sony; which has been smartest player of this gen wont take this risk.

If I recall correctly, Greg Miller and Colin Moriarty (when they were still at IGN) both saw Uncharted 4 and continuously claimed that the game would never make it to 2015. The game needed to be polished for a good release and wouldn't be possible for Q4 2015.

This will hurt it saleswise, but personally I find this better for me being that so many games release in Q4 and it's hard to play all of them in a reasonable timeframe.

Agree hope the deal will hurt them hard. There will be other good games live UC4.

However long it takes, i'll buy it when the time and price is right. And yes, it'll sell better on the PS4, like pretty much everything so far has.

Microsoft is wasting money with this and the Minecraft deal.