Did Konami really make a profit from mgs4? Im sure they could have spent $100 million on wii game developement, put out 5 or 6 AAA titles and made alot more profit.

"Every game known to man would make more if it was multiplatform. But exclusives aren't about spending tons of money, they're about showing that the hardware has appealing software that warrants the purchase of said hardware"

Why would 3rd parties care about moving hardware over selling more copies of their game? It makes no sense for any 3rd party to release games on only one of the HD consoles, the only exception is they get payed a heap of cash for the exclusive.

Considering it was a big budget game that everyone swore wouldn't do well, coupled with the misunderstanding of "it needs to sell a million in one day to be profitable", and the fact that it's doing a lot better than what VGC is showing (VGC doesn't include bundle sales for some reason) this game looks to have made back its' money.

Don't turn this into a falme thread. All I was asking is if people still think like the masses did in 2007, where every PS3 game simply had to go multiplatform because "it wouldn't make any money on the PS3"....but every 360 exclusive should stay exclusive because it will "make money".....despite the fact that the PS3 install is growing faster than the 360

It may not be true of all games, but its true that most games would sell far better as multiplatform games or Xbox 360 exclusives.

As has been said, this game could potentially not have cleared its budget based on sales alone.  Of course, I'm sure Sony is funding a large profit margin, but thats moneyhatting, not the game doing well on its own.

Ehhm, I really don't think MGS4 made Konami a lot of money. In fact I think they would have had a better return on investment if they had put the entire development budget on the bank for 4 years.

Seriously, the 2.5 million sales the game has so far is definitely not enough to make a decent amount of money. And no, breaking even is NOT a success. A game like MGS4 is Konami's major franchise and only releases once every four years or so. It needs a pretty high ROI to satisfy shareholders.

Well, to Konami, it's 3 million sales.  As it doesn't really matter to them after they sell it to the store how much it sells, since they get their money from the store purchasing the game.

Thats applicable for ANY game.  But i think the game industry is a bit like the recording industry.  If a company massively overships the title retailers can return excess due to unreasonable sales expectations.

how the hell do you know how much it cost Konami to develop and market MGS4?

It's not about whether or not big budget games make good money...its about the fact that, no matter what, they can make more money going multiplatform. This is not only happening with the PS3. We are getting Bioshock and have already seen games like Enchanted Arms and Lost Planet among others.

Very clever...

On topic, well some people like to believe that high budget projects on high cost platforms, with the smallest current base can give you tons of money, but since I have seen more 3rd partyes doing the opposite, I prefer to believe that they weren´t so sure, and they choosed the best option for them...

2.5 million to 3 million shipped unreasonable?

I mean, the game will eventually go on to sell at least 4 million, which would put it in the 4.5-5 million shipped range, which would be 270 million -300 million base revenue, that's without the people who bought the Limited 90 buck edition of the game, and minus the microtransactions for MGO.  And again, however Sony paid the company which was most likely done through marketing the game.  I think Kojima/Konami will have made out pretty well. 

And again, we have no clue whether the game cost 100 million or not, but I'd be pretty certain that it costed less than GTA IV.