How can they justify the expense?

[davygee]

You will find that not all 360/PS3 games cost 15-20m to develop.  Yes, games like Resistance, Killzone and Gears of War cost s fortune, but you will find that developers will be getting hard cash from Sony or MS to develop on their platform.

There is a mythical 500k number being banded around, that generally represents the required number of units to be sold to break even.  This will be based on a $3-$4m budgetted project, which suggests generally that $8 from each game sold goes back to the developers to recoup costs.

360 and PS3 games are generally $10-$20 more expensive to buy and would probably include $15 or so for the developers.  I reckon traditionally, a game for either the 360 or PS3 would cost double the PS2 generation budget at the moment...so $6-$8m, which would mean they would need to sell just over 500k to make back their money.  But with games like Killzone and Resistance with their rumoured $20-$40m budgets, would mean that the games would have to sell over 2.5m copies to break even.

A game like GTAIV would have a huge budget also, but combined 360 and PS3 sales should easily break the 2.5m sales worldwide.

The problem is that developers will not be making the same money they did last generation unless they develop more for the Wii and DS.