I'm telling you. Its watch_dogs.

Multplatform to the n-th degree.
Whole new engine.
Extremely defined open-world where AI is unique to everything. Far more than GTA.

if you count the cost of developing the game engine maybe, but why would any one be stupid enougth to factor that cost into a single game.

Why would any game cost that much without including the game engine?

This engine was built for this game. Sure it will likely be used on future games, but this is what it was built for.

I highly doubt it.

Ubisoft results in the last few years would have been impacted by this kind of budget ( we're talking of hiding something like 300 million$ of development cost in the last few years...).

Most likely Cliff is talking out of his ass like he has done a lot recently....

The most expensive game ever developed ( if you do not account for inflation) is Star Wars the old republic with a development budget of around 150-200 million$.

I'm pretty sure that if there was a game around there costing 300 million$ in development we would have heard about it ( it would be suicidal for any publicly traded company to invest that much in a game and hide it from investors...)

pffft I doubt such an IP even exists or gets funded to begin with.

probably destiny.

and it's about the whole budget, not only development costs... activision will probably pump 100m+ just in marketing. they want this to be a huge success for a decade or more and have to invest a huge amount in marketing to let people know about this game. if they can increase the sales with a huge marketing budget and if the game will be good, destiny 2 and 3 will also sell great because of that first huge investment for destiny 1 because many people will be fans then which they wouldn't be without playing destiny 1.

and if it has to sell 10m some of those sales would be not for a full price anymore which cliffy also knows so probably a budget of ~200m for everything and activision needs to get 20 bucks per sold game.

same for watch_dogs which could be also possible but i think activision is best known to pump a lot in marketing (didn't they invest like 200m for marketing of only one cod game?)

If we just think about it from a technical point of view for a moment, we can probably work it out (ish ;)

Lets start with

Watch_Dogs. Pretty sure its cost a lot of money to make, but more than say GTAIV, which someone stated needs 6-7 million to break even. I think GTA would cost more to make. So though I think Watch Dogs is expensive, I feel that probably needs 5-6 million to break even.

TitanFall. This game has only been in dev for a few years, and is using an available engine, and is mainly (as far as i understand it) a COD based multiplayer game. The team isn't meant to be that big working on this game. Suspect this will need to sell 2-3 million to break even.

That leaves me with two possible contenders, based on what types of games they are, and the scope of them.

The Division
Destiny

Dont really know much about the Division yet, so thats a possible, but unlikely imho. So I would have to go with Destiny, a MMO based game (we know MMO's are expensive)... and on next gen. Big world for a game expected to last many many years. It has to be Destiny.

Destiny is the only game that can break the cost mark of $200 million of The Old Republic.

Not pikmin I assure you, probs GTA cause of da amount of graphics guys you need to make that huge open world. Pikmin's the sort of franchise where u can reuse the same model six bazillion times and it will still look different depending where you place it.

GTAV is the only one out of those 3 that seems reasonable.