I don't think the game would have been pushed to the 360 unless the development was already over budget. The high cost of development scared them into a multi-platform strategy.

The question shouldn't be whether it made a profit, but how it compares to previous Final Fantasies.

Also, the number of customers is very important.

no... as you can see the game recived a fair share of bad reviews, and it doesnt look like its going to be AAA title

Unless that is the cost for the games on the PS2, in which case we could likely double that.

so according to you the advertising has cost 60 - 70 Million in Japan

riiiiiiight......

so some people say S-E gets 50% of the cut from retailers, some are saying they get 90%

some are saying 80 million is too much for development, some say 30 - 40 million is the right amount

some are saying only 10 million is too less for advertising, some are saying the advertising can cost upto 60 - 70 million in Japan alone

some are saying its obviously made a profit in its first week, if it didn't something is seriously wrong and it has to have profited if its shipped 2 million, while others say its nowhere near a profit
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I am not going to change the OP with new figures or calculations as everyone is saying different things & we haven't come to a clear conclusion

Then they didn't care about the quality of the game enough to bribe reviewers into saying it's good.

Retailers can't survive on a 10% margin for games. So whoever told you 90% is making up numbers.

A random google search brought up these costs for FF games - although I've no idea where their source is:

In Dollars:

FFVII : 26 million
FFVIII : 30 million
FFIX : 38 million
FFX : 40 million
FFXI : 12 million

Those are total costs including marketing.

 It's an old forum thread so FFXII wasn't out yet, although I'm sure I read it has the same as FFX roughly.

 So I'd guess FFXIII is getting on to somewhere in line with $60-$70 million total costs, with marketing and such like. It has a higher retail price then previous FF's to justify the extra investment.

Where I got figures from: http://forum.beyond3d.com/archive/index.php/t-2832.html 

 It's amazing how much they spent on the PS1 games imo.

In the USA a game $60 will be sold to retailers for $48 (Source is from Invisible Walls + some googling will bring it up). Can be lower then $48 if the company buy alot of copies or in exchange for 'priority' shelf space. So that's a 20% margin right there, although Japan could no doubt be different.

 It's iffy how discounting games work, but I assume if a retail orders 100000 copies of a game and it bombs, they've got some protection so they don't have to sell all those $48 games at $20.

 The used game market is where they make their money.