Game development costs: Reggie says...

[albionus]

Legend11 said:

fkusumot said:

Wii games cost a little more. Developing a game for Wii might cost $5 million to $10 million, including all of the marketing costs.

By contrast, developing a game for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 can cost $20 million to $50 million, Fils-Aime asserted. As a result, a developer needs to sell 1.3 million to 1.5 million copies of a game to turn a profit, he argued.

I think some people are missing the fact that he is using words like "might" and "can" instead of absolutes.

Of course he's not dealing with absolutes.  The absolute range of cost for making a game would be between zero dollars and infinity but that doesn't tell us much.  More realistically, if you really really wanted to I'm sure you could make a PS360 game for less than $1million.  On the flip side I'm sure you could blow through a couple hundred mil making a Wii game if a company so desired.  Anything is of course possible so I think in this case he's giving us something like a confidence range for serious games.  That is most but not all non-shovelware games made for those systems will fall into the ranges Reggie gave.  Much more useful but certainly not absolute which is why absolutes weren't used.