So Retailers don't make money anymore?

 damn retailers...always bitching about money. did crysis start at 49.99 or 59.99? if 59.99 the retailers get 10 for each sold xp

but i guess if you were to add in the retailers crysis would roughly need to sell 550,000

but then again does the 22 million represent retailers money for selling the game?

Even if Gears didn't cost $10m-$12m, what was Konami doing that made things cost 5 times more?

Shenmue on the DC cost $70m after 5 years of development on two consoles, team changes, & very slow development.

MGS4 took FOUR years of development, on ONE console.
*Side-note*: They wasted time pushing the PS3 to "85%" optimized power, only to downplay it to "50%" to make future PS3 games look good (SO I'VE READ...). In the end, the game (supposedly) costs $60m, making the PS3 dev venture almost as difficult financially as Shenmue was, without the problems.

DO NOT forget the cost of inflation:
Shenmue (1995-2000) $70m
MGS4 (2004-2008) $60m
Who knows how much that game would've cost 8 years ago.....

Excessive spending like this is troubling and it will just keep getting worse as companies value bleeding edge tactics more than anything else, in the search of photorealism.

I still liked the game, wasn't the best thing ever but it was what it was supposed to be.

@Cost Discussion,

I'm glad to see more people understand that the cost of an employee goes beyond their salary/wages. It really is ridiculous how much companies spend to keep employees and it can be a lot worse if you want to keep good employees!

double post, sorry

 An infinitely more complex game with a gigantic and extremely elaborated 9 hours of realtime cinematics that involved over a dozen main characters and state of the art motion capture and direction ..maybe ?

Also epic didnt add the price of the engine to the cost of the game. some parts of Gears was also outsourced to china. And there were less people working on the title compared to metal gear

proof 

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/rein-puts-dev-cost-for-gears-of-war-at-10m

crysis started (and I think still sold at) $49.99.  Crytek didn't publish the game, EA did.  So EA gets a cut, Crytek gets a cut, and retailer gets a cut.  I don't know how it breaks down, but say Crytek put up all of the $22 million and they get $15 per copy sold through retailers they would need to sell 1,466,667 copies.  But that doesn't take in DD where they would get a much bigger cut.  I would also wager that EA pitched in some money and since Logitec and Nvidia have their brand pictures on the back of the box you can be sure they pitched in some money also.  But really Crysis is a tech demo for the Crytek Engine like Gears of War and Unreal are for the Unreal Engine so they make plenty of money I'm sure.