One of the things you need to remember is that the $5 million is for programming on a system that they have been working with for 7 years and thus are very fimilure with.  This means that it take alot less time to program games and thus leads to lower development costs.

With the latest generation the developers haven't figured out many of the tricks to program for the systems yet.  Because of this it takes them longer with more people to develope each game.  As time goes on and the developers become more fimilar with the codeing on each machine, I expext the development costs to drop.

Mario Galaxy.....laughs at such a thought.

A low end title, by definition could be just about anything. I was just giving random numbers for what I figured would be considered a low budget game.

By low budget, I'm not talking Monster Madness-type. I'm more meaning Vampire Rain, Project Sylpheed, and a few others.

Monster Madness-type games that are very simple UE3 projects probably cost from $500,000 to $2,000,000 including publishing (and I'd think getting the materials for packaging/distribution cost quite a bit too).

A good example would be XBLA games for a litmus test: none, if very few, have gone over the $1m USD mark. I talked with the Band of Bugs creator (for XBLA, an Isometric RPG), and they said it was made for a few hundred thousand USD. It's a pretty good game to compare Monster Madness to. Difference is, BoB is $10.

About Call of Duty 4:

There's no real way to say how good, or bad it'll do now GTA4 is DOA this year. With GTA out of the way, COD4 could do gangbusters. COD3 was a turd compared to COD2, but managed 2.5m copies in the US alone (1m between Wii/PS3, 1.1m+ on X360, and still charting).

I'd assume, if COD4 got rave reviews, it could manage 4m in the US. That'd might make it challenge SMG for a few months, or years even.

hmmm... Call of Duty 4 does look very good, and it will probably outsell Mario Galaxy this holiday season, but i think by the end of this gen mario galaxy will beat it. The advantage COD4 has is that it's on 3 systems compared to SMG's one. #

However I think that Mario vs Sonic will sell more then COD4 or maybe even be the best selling title, simply because Mario and Sonic are on the cover and it's on the DS as well as the Wii.

Super Mario Galaxy does look pretty incredible.

I think Call of Duty 4 from what I've seen looks pretty awesome, but is heading in more of a Ghost Recon direction in terms of combat, which would really limit its audience.