Ueda speaks about The Last Guardian.

[Zim]

Slimebeast said:

I think normally with an expected 4 year development time for this type of game and a typical ~$20 million dev budget it would have had a decent chance at breaking even. Even making a good profit if it met all expectations selling 1.5-2 million.

Now with a 8 year dev time if it comes out in 2014 (and I'm being generous here since SotC came out in 2005), and dev costs with a 50 member team is ~$5 million per year, and add to that $5-10 million total for promotion and marketing, we end up at a total cost of $45-50 million.

Sony collects around $30 per copy sold in a best case scenario, meaning the game could break even at ~1.5 million lifetime copies. Unlikely but not entirely impossible.

Pretty good estimate I think. Only thing I would say you are off on is marketing and promotion. $5-10million would be a tiny amount. At the very start of the generation Lost Planet had $20million in marketing. Admittedly that game had a reasonable marketing push but it was also 6 years ago, or 7-8 by the time this game is released. 

I would say $50million isn't an unreasonable guess though. I think Team Ico is a little smaller than 50 members but then there is the extra cost of having to rope in people from other parts of sony etc. 

Team Ico's model simply isn't going to work going forward. I know they aren't a big team but they also aren't exactly some tiny indie team. You can't have a reasonable sized team with over 6 years between releases and still no sight of when they will actually have a release. 

EDIT: Should add joystiq had an article about Studio Cipher Prime. Which only employs 4 people. Their montly costs were 15k.