First of all I don't understand why $55million is considered so unreasonable as a total budget cost, GTA4 cost $100 million, so why wouldn't another "AAA" title be a little over half that, especially when you consider it's time in development. There are a few excuses given here for trying to drop down the production cost which are laughable really. I'm going to address each one.
Only in development since Liberation finished
Sorry but this is just ridiculous, the fact that they presented a demo at E3 in 2005 means that the game was underway. Even if it was in its project planning, design and/or concept stages, it was still under way. It costs money to pay the project managers, it costs money to pay your artists to develop the look. The demo may have been CGI but it's still all animation work and it has to come from some sort of design work. Even if they outsourced the development of that demo as I've seen posted on this forum, it costs even more to outsource something that than develop it in house because the 3rd party developer isn't a charity and needs to make a profit and cover their own business costs. This game has clearly been in development since early 2005 at a bare minimum, that gives you a 4 year development timeline. The fact they were working on KZ:Liberation is completely irrelevant, when a game is in it's final stages of development you don't have your artists sitting around twiddling their thumbs, you start ramping up the next project and have all your resources working all the time, it's not rocket science.
Rent, etc doesn't count
What a load of crap! When a company works on a single product/project at a time (with the exception of overlap at the start/end) then you need to take into account all costs associated with running a business. If you don't agree with that then I encourage you to never EVER go into business for yourself, because you'll go broke very quickly. If you don't take into account rent and other business costs like administration, utilities and infrastructure, then where does this magic money come from to pay for it all? Trees? You can't just mess with the books to make it look any better, Guerrilla have a single source of income which is game sales. Those game sales go into the revenue column of a profit & loss statement and EVERYTHING else that involves money leaving their bank account is a cost towards selling games. Again, this isn't rocket science, everything has be paid for.
Sony produce, manufacture and publish it so they get all the money
Firstly you have retailer margin, shipping to retailer, distributor margin, shipping to distributor, import duty, taxes & manufacturing costs. Shipping may not be much but it's still a cost. For a $60 game you are looking at around 10-15% to retailer and same again for the distributor. SCEE will take their cut from a SCEA game, and vice versa, same as all other offices around the world. Now Sony may offer a discount on these numbers for being a first party game, however Guerrilla, SCEA & SCEE are still separate businesses that need to balance their own books, Guerrilla as an entity payed for the production costs themselves, the still need to split the sale cost of the game with other parties involved with getting the game into the customers hands. Manufacturing may not cost much, however it's still Bluray which is more expensive, it's still a full colour glossy cover and manual inside and these all cost money, perhaps only a couple of bucks, but when the game is going out the door for around US$25-30, then a couple of bucks is still another 10%.
Bundles
It's still bundled in others in some countries, or offered as a free game in other others. Guerrilla will still get their cut from the game which goes towards paying off the "reported" $55m, but Sony as a whole loses out and they've been doing this with every one of their big titles on day 1 of each games launch.
Bottom Line
Granted Sony as a whole gets a bigger cut of that $60 than they did with say GTA4, however the development budget is still Guerrilla's debt regardless of them being a subsidiary of SCE. Their cut is minimal and there is a lot more work which goes towards getting the physical project into the hands of customers around the world and that is why each party involved takes a cut. Each party has their own salaries and bills to pay which is an additional cost to Sony outside the development budget. I would suggest that 2 million in sales at full price would be the absolute minimum that KZ2 needs to barely break even and that would still be considered a massive failure. You don't make games to break even, as you're just back to where you started in the beginning, what's the point? I've read many reports of game development for HD consoles starting at $15-20million, so $55 for a massive game like Killzone 2 is hardly unreasonable, you can see the amount of polish the game has in their animations and polish like that isn't cheap. You can rip my post to shreds all you like, however you're only kidding yourself.
Never argue with idiots
They bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience
