Ueda speaks about The Last Guardian.

[Zim]

Slimebeast said:

Good. You too believe in high marketing costs (in that publishers have them, not that it's a good thing). I have debated many here on VGC who always claim my marketing cost estimations are too high.

With $5-10 million for marketing I was thinking a scenario where Sony has half-abandoned the game and almost silently releases it, as hype has died down and perhaps the game will come at an ill time (it's possible it's a PS3-only release well into next gen).

This article says Team ICO is 50 guys (thord paragraph). With the problems TLG has had I wouldn't be surprised if it's a bit smaller now though.

http://www.1up.com/news/team-ico-boss-fumito-ueda-leaving-sony

Ah right. I just remember hearing they were a small team. I hadn't seen that article. Your estimate is fine then. I'm not sure some people realise just how much it actually costs to keep a team of that size running for years. 

People underestimate marketing costs for everything, even movies. While there are obviously some games where the marketing budget is tiny, generally speaking with titles in production for years at bigger studios the budget isn't going to be small. As I recall Battlefield 3 had a marketing budget of $100million. Obivously that is an extreme case and isn't the normal but it shows how high they can go. Lost Planet was $20million. I remember it getting a fair marketing push but certainly plenty of games this generation have had the same or more marketing. 

I too think there is a risk with The Last Guardian that it comes out on PS3 after next gen hype is already here. I've seen some people stating how they think it will be shifted to PS4 for launch but given that Team Ico have never made a HD game before and their only experience of doing so is on PS3. Then that the PS4 is likely completely changing architecture. Then that given TLG's technical difficulties it is likely it has had to be extremely customised to the PS3. I just think it would be a tall order to expect it to be a PS4 game near launch. Unless they had extreme foresight and have already been targetting it for PS4 for a while.