A few things Riot:
1)Many companies are quickly going out of business this generation, or losing profit. Have you paid any attention to the financials of Midway? Sega? Namco? Their HD games have cost them millions. Have you noticed the fact that most profit reports have flat increases from last generation, despite nearly 50% market growth all around?
2) Sonic Next Gen is considered a gigantic flop. End of story. You'll notice the multiplat (360 and Wii only platforms confirmed) game that was recently announced mimmicks the controls and style of their last success: The Wii game.
3) A lot of developers are making up for high dev costs by developing their games on the PC and porting to the consoles post-production. PC development is far cheaper, and it's basically a free extra platform to sell your games on. The porting is also much easier from PC to PS3 and 360 individually than from 360 to PS3 or vice versa. A few examples of games that have done this include Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament 3, and even Devil May Cry 4.
And finally, Mr. Barlog may indeed have been exaggerating, but there are a lot of games with recorded dev costs well upward of $20 million and $30 million. It's certainly not the average. Even Barlog said those were high-end costs. You are acting like those are the default budgets for all games (even crap like Sonic), but it also is proven that budgets that high do exist.
I'm suggesting that LO and BD are somewhere in between those high budgets (30-40 million) and the low budgets (10-15 million) at somewhere around 20-25 million each. Maybe more for one game and less for the other. Again, all we can do is estimate costs, but games with production values like that are most likely not in the low end of 360 dev costs.
