Bad analysis. There are other costs involved including marketing, distribution, retail, licensing, administrative, etc. It's more likely they took a loss after subtracting all the expenses.

When it comes to publishers (the people who fund your game) it is all about the money ...

Anyways, many forms of art require a financial backing in order to exist; a very common one is Theater. With the theater there are limits to how much money you can get allocated for a show which are set based on the ammount of money you can reasonably collect from the show; certainly you could spend 4 to 5 times that and get a great deal of "Artistic" benefit from it but no producer is going to fund it. Shows like Cats have massive budgets (and historically high revinues) because they can tour around the country and collect 5 to 10 times as much money per show than a local show can yet there are (easily) 10 to 100 times as many shows produced locally on a shoe string budget than there are big budget shows.

Well, this news is older than the written word, but the Movie Serenity was mentioned in this thread which automatically makes it full of awesome and win. Plus Serenity is a direct link to the Firefly series which makes this thread even MORE awesome.

Try getting financing for a project that costs millions of dollars. Good luck telling the suits that's it's not about money. Might want to put some padding on your ass to prevent bruises as you're kicked out the door.

What FishyJoe mentioned about movies applies to games as well.

Craptastic movies that looked good on paper are not screened for fear that appalling reviews will kill whatever chance the movie had to recoup investment, let alone reap profits.

Craptastic games that looked good on paper are not sent to game review sites for fear that appalling reviews will kill whatever chance the game had to recoup investment, let alone reap profits.

And no matter what, money is god. Even filthy-rich billionaires like Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea and plonked hundreds of millions of dollars into the team per year not only because he wanted to own a football club; the ulterior motive was always to profit from said purchase.

I dunno, the link is definitely old, but the discussion isn't that bad...I don't see the need to lock this topic, do you? It gives a reason to talk about development costs, does nobody want to discuss that?

I don't think that is a relevant analogy.  Have you seen how much money Chelsea are losing per year under Abramovich's ownership?  The transfer fees are astronomical; no club could afford them without a fat cat like Abramovich footing the bill.  In this case he's not really out to make money, I think obviously; it's clear that Chelsea are his plaything and he's enjoying himself being their owner.

However, with game publishers, yes, always money is first.  These are public companies accountable to their shareholders and, thus, the bottom line.  If they make a terrible game but it makes money they are happy.

I also dont think we should be using what ONE third party says they need to sell as a blanket benchmark for all third parties on the PS3. Thats not in any way reasonable IMO. For all we know these guys are garbage with money and have poor budget management. Unless other companies start to come forth and say that they also need to sell X amount of games to break even I'm only going to use the 500k marker for Namco Bandai games. I highly doubt they know how much other 3rd parties need to sell on PS3 to turn profit.

I don't think the financial impact is due to engine/coding coding or lack of reuse at all -- I think it's mostly from the higher-spec audiovisual expectations for HD games. It definitely takes more effort to paint a texture in high-resolution, then derive a matching bump map or normal map and/or specularity map from that texture, than it does to just paint an old-fashioned low-resolution texture. It takes more effort to model a realistically asymmetric stone archway with crevices and twists and crumbling rock than it does a simple horseshoe shape with a granite texture slapped onto it. Game production costs are going up because now everything is expected to look and sound really, really good on the high-end systems. Say what you like about Ridge Racer 7, you can bet it took a lot more resources to create its look than it did Ridge Racer (1). Even if the underlying code were exactly the same source ported to the Cell, it would have required a bigger investment to make it look like a 2006 title.