Reminds me of the film The Room. You watch that thing and assume it cost $50 to make, and find out it cost over $6 million, and used tons of really hi-tech special effects. You'd never know though. I really don't know where these people get money like this to just dump away.

LOL. The Room just reminded me of The Cube... god that movie was awful.

LOL is it above your understanding that the guy started work on the game right after the huge hit lotr? You are putting serious words in my mouth. But this guy was the writer. Voice actor. Actor. and Director. HE DID A LOT OF WORK! Your telling me a top name guy can get almost a million dollars for talking into a mic for 1 hour of his time and And cant get a couple million from months of his time while doing 4 different jobs directly after he played a role in 3 ginormous movies? get real dude

Hey I loved Cube.  It actually had natural dialogue and the scenes were actually related to each other.  The Room was random people saying random things in a random order.  "Oh it's just breast cancer, I'll be fine."  They never mention it again for the whole movie.

Cube 2 and Cube Zero were horrible bastardizations of the original though.

I don't know if you know how the Entertainment industry works... but yes.  The top name guys make TONS more then the little guys do.

Directors and Writers don't make that much in the videogame industry... while actor and voice actor is the same job.

Well in the film industry sequels cost more than new I.P. as you can pay your actors less, however the pay scale escalates heavily with successful properties whereas the game industry has cheaper/faster production for 2nd/3rd games in the same series whilst having lower marketing requirements. Also both benefit from having sequels because the success of future products also benefits the previously released content, so for example Gears of War 1 adding half a million sales due to the success of Gears of War 2 and furthermore once they release the trilogy the effect will happen again and finally they get the opportunity to re-release their games another time in the next generation and thus turn on 5M selling game into a 20M selling series.

In this case it's not the same job. Unlike the guy who got paid 750k to just speak for an hour Andy had to speak for a lot longer than that then he had to go to the mocap process and act out all the scenes. The guy was a big name back in '04 when he started working on HS right after the hugely successful LOTR Trilogy.

To my knowledge only 1 developer has lost money on Wii to the point it required them to shut down.  There are several such cases on the HD side of things.

Average break even point for a Wii title is ~300k units.  Average break even point for an HD title is over 1 million units. 

Don't forget that publishers typically fund the development from the start.  A lot of these studios that went under started the projects with their own money and then pitched them to publishers and failed to generate enough revenue to recoup their initial development costs.  Ninja Theory is alsow one of those developers who began the project prior to the publisher (Sony) getting involved.

 MGS4 had a much higher production budget than Heavenly Sword.   The voice talent angle you are pushing is irrelevant.  

The problem here is that Ninja Theory started the project prior to signing the contract with Sony so Sony didn't front the development money (as it works with most projects).  The game didn't sell like they had hoped so Ninja Theory didn't recover their costs.   Voice talent is such a small portion of the total budget that it's silly to point to it as the blame for profit failure.

No he wasn't a big name... and he's not... and yes it would be seen as the same job.

Motion capture people aren't paid that much anyway.

Do you think the Mortal Kombat guys are getting paid big money? Those guys had to do actual Kung Fu!  Not to mention they motion capture atheltes for sports games all the time.

Your putting together something he would be lucky to get 500K for, and adding in a bunch of jobs that pay probably a total of 100K if lucky, and turning that into a million... even though consoldiating jobs with 1 person should be cheaper and not more expensive.

You know how popular "My precious" is? Obviously not or else you wouldn't be saying that. The guy was a cult hit in a mainstream movie. Motion Capture people aren't normally Gollum from LOTR. 500k for a job when you yourself provided links showing 1 hour of VA work from actors gets paid that much? Please... Your silly. In no way do I think Andy make millions like Tom Cruise but at the same time if you want to hire Smeagol from LOTR you are going to pay a premium. Especially if there was terrible management like suggested. It'd be overpaid.