NJ5 on 18 May 2009
Probably almost all of the cost is salaries and office space/maintenance for each member of a team. Every time we hear about budgets we hear things like "a team with X members". That, and most of the blame for high HD budgets is put on the need for many artists to work on the graphics, artists are employees so...
The stuff like computers and software is not cheap either, but you can reuse it for several projects so...
This is not unique to game developers. Software companies in general spend most of their money on staff, since there are no complex factories to build or anything like that.
My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957
