hmmm, their using their own UE3 engine which of course was made by a separate team whom solely work on engine tech so the cost of those programmers is no factored into the budget of Gears, and since it's their own engine, there is no licensing of this engine so again their is no cost, also it's Microsoft who is covering their marketing so again this is some thing not aacounted for in the actual Gears game.
So 12 million is reasonable for the small team doing the art and gameplay aspects of the game, pretty cool, but I wonder how much they spent on actually making the UE3.
Also, I've seen people throw how Killzone 2 cost about 60Million, but one must consider that these guys built their own graphics engine from the ground up which is factored into the games budget but Gears doesn't factor in the creation of the U3 engine since the engine was created by another team for the purpose of being middleware, so it's natural for them to use their own engine but not include the cost of it in the Gears budget.
I reckon that if a portion of the engine creation, as well as the cost of marketing was added to gether along with the 12 Million, we could roughly get something abour 20 - 30 million if not something close to 60 millioif the whole cost of the engine is uncluded since this was technically the 1st showcase of what UE3 could do.
