What NJ5 has for numbers is probably a lot closer to the correct one. About 50% of the price of anything you buy is retailer profit.

Off a 60$ game, that would mean that 30$ to the retailer and the other 30$ to be divided between Developper, Middle Men and royalties to the console manufacturer.

So the $100 million is a guess (albeit a guess by an authorative source), but if you think about the number of people working on the game, it's not implausible at all...

Imagine an average of 300 people working for three years (they say 1000 people but some of them were probably part-time). That's 900 man-years. If all the costs were in manpower, that would mean about $110,000 per person per year. If that seems too high, consider that costs go much farther than manpower (hardware, software, song licensing, among other stuff).

The entry ticket for a current gen game (except the Wii) is around 10 Million. A big AAA game is more about 20 M. Then there is the superproduction at 30-40 (MGS, KZ2, Halo, FF..)
An average Wii game is between 2-5 and could reach 10 for big game (red steel for example)

All the 60-80-100 announced budget are just marketing.

I think it is $10,000,000.

Developers have said that they need to sell 500,000 units to break even on a PS3/360 game. Developers get about $20 for each copy sold at retail. 500,000 * $20 = $10,000,000.

Also, Uncharted cost $20,000,000 to develop. It is certainly an above average budget game.

Truth is, no one knows.

@DMeisterJ: Not really, this is not one of the industry's well kept secrets. There are plenty of reports about it, here is another one which quotes a Screen Digest report:

http://compsci.ca/blog/profitability-in-video-game-industry/

A little googling goes a long way.

But there's no real sources on that, just speculation that games cost 50 mil.

Show me a financial report or something.  Then we can talk.  Until then, it's all reports and speculation.

I'm not out to convince you of anything, you can search for yourself ;) Maybe you believe games are made in sweatshops in China or India?

No, games are mostly made in developed countries. According to gamasutra the industry average salary is $70,000. If you have a calculator, you can easily do the math.

PS: Most financial reports probably don't show things on a per-project basis, so good luck with that.

From discussion with other devs, such as Factor 5, most HD development starts at 10 mil and for a AAA title can go up to 50 mil on average. Wii development generally runs 3-7 mil in comparison.

The developer, if they are using a separate publisher, will receive a VERY small amount of money. The publisher generally fronts the money for development in a traditional scenario, and the developer sees no royalties until the publisher recoups their money. So if the developer gets $30 of a $50 game, and they spent $30 mil for the development process, that means that after a million copies sell, they will break even. Of course, the publisher wants a bigger net income for their investment, so they set the actual turnaround number higher before they have to pay the developer royalties. So they might need to sell 1.5 mil copies, or 2 mil copies before the developer gets royalties, and even at that point, they are small - maybe 10-15 dollars on a 50 dollar game.

In the end, the developer gets money to pay their staff to make a game, and whatever extra they save is what they actually bank. Otherwise, most development studios are paid only to exist and make a game, rarely to profit from it. This is where indie development pays off.

Exactly my point.

The only people that know how much games cost to make are the dev/publishers.  It's not in financial reports or anything like that.