@Naznatipz:

That sounds like BS to me. How in the world is it possible for developers to profit with those costs? I've always believed HD consoles development costs are way overrated. If games really cost that much, do you honestly believe the HD consoles would get ANY support at all? A game like Eternal Sonata would destroy a company with those type of costs. You understand that you're suggesting HD games cost 40-60 million dollars to make, right? Games cost no where near that. Third-party support wouldn't exist with those costs.

Well Gears of War cost 10 million to make, so if what you say about ps2 games costing 20-30 mill is true....

 And Gears cost 10 million, what one agme costs means Fuk all about anothers cost.

Well if you haven't noticed actual profits are flat or down slightly this gen for most major companies (not counting Activision and Nintendo) despite higher revenues and a greatly expanded market.  Those companies that have seen a postive increase in profit aren't even close to seeing profit increases at the same rate as the market increase.

Wholesale price for a $60 video game is about $35.  Once you take away publishing fees and printing costs the developer only sees about $25 of that.  If Barlog is right, and I would assume he is since his entire job is making these games, then a developer of a big budget game would have to sell 1.6 million copies of a $40 million game to break even.  Obviously the amount of copies necessary to break even goes up as dev costs do.  None of this takes into account advertising either, although on the 360 Microsoft pays for advertisement for all big budget games. 

As a side note, dodece is actually correct about one thing.  The fact that Lost Odyssey uses a middleware engine certainly lowers dev costs.  Barlog's estimates most likely are for games like MGS4 and FFXIII in which engines had to be developed from the ground up along with the game, and it's very possible that LO was made for more like $25 million or so, but of course the 3 year development time also has to be taken into account...

That's a PR number.  Gears of War costs 10 million because Epic A) Didn't count the dev costs of their Unreal Engine 3 which believe me was not cheap and B) Obviously didn't charge themselves to use their own Engine.  It's not like everyone else can use the Unreal Engine for free.

That's why they develop their own engine, to keep costs down. Do you think the development cost of Unreal Engine 3 should be counted in for every game thay make with it? Of course not, they recover those costs by licensing it to other studios, so I think it is entirely reasonable for them to leave it out. I will give you this though, 10 million does sound pretty low for a game that initially set the bar for current gen graphics.

Naznatips is way out of the ball park. Somewhere across the street in a pub downing a few too many. Telling a few too many tall tales to the guy passed out in the seat next to him. He really needs to learn to think about what he is saying that is all there is to it.

Seriously we are talking about turn based games. One is using a third party engine, and both were heavily outsourced to reduce costs. These titles were cheaper by their nature, and by the development processes involved. You cannot compare them against a in house high end title with full environmental textures, high end physics engines, proprietary game engines, and all the costs that pile up along with them.

Frankly it would be amazing if these titles were made for more then fifteen million dollars a piece let alone thirty million a piece. What is supposedly driving up these development costs the cinematic work. Honestly Sony themselves did an entire CGI series ten years ago for less then ten million dollars. All the episodes of Roughnecks combined may have had four hundred minutes of footage. Frankly that is the level Lost Odyssey was at, and they only had forty five minutes of footage. So I am really hard pressed to find where they are supposedly spending such massive sums on these titles.

I even did Naznatips the courtesy of taking the time to look for where he might have gotten this bogus information. Simply put there is none he just made the numbers up, and I went through four search engines looking. The best I could find was the development process of how they made Lost Odyssey, and there were no financial statements.

I showed you the source I used to estimate dev costs... you say these were cheap games by their nature, but how many cheap games cost 3 years to develop (albiet much of which was overlapped between the two)? I at least have developer statements on estimated dev costs for big games this gen. Not to mention they hired Nobuo Uematsu for the musical scores, a well-known and hardly cheap composer.

I even was willing to concede that they may have been more mid-budget next gen games in the 20 millions, but your entire argument is "The dev costs aren't high cause I don't want them to be." Not that Mistwalker actually fronted any of these costs because Microsoft paid for both games, but your claims that they were cheap are simply not supported by the evidence.

If it makes you feel better, we can estimate the combined costs at ~$40 million, in which the games would have needed to sell ~1.6 million combined to break even.

@Naznatips

I want a link not your fuzzy recollections. I think everyone would like to see your link, because frankly nobody is buying what you are pushing. Which is utter nonsense by the way. How hard is it to provide proof if your right?