A handful of somewhat successful old-generation developers is not representative at all of the whole, Squilliam. There were a handful of successful PC developers in the mid-to-late 1980s too who never went over to the NES as their primary platform (Sierra On-Line, LucasArts, Maxis, Interplay, Microprose, etc.). They were the big names in the industry, the trailblazers of the 1980s PC scene. They could muscle through the mainstream portion of the industry cycle intact. Most PC developers, however, could not.

Is a music game that really isn't development heavy...

Games by those guys are hyped beyond belief and both Halo 3 and Unreal 3 are worse then the previous installment of the series

Have yet to produce a single game this gen

And as Sky said it's not representative of the whole a few teams making it (basically the ones with the console makers behind them) is not going to represent the whole and while those guys will make unbelieveable games during this time with graphics heavy games the rest will need to do something else if they are going to survive as a business...

Ugh not this crap again.... You hear this every generation. Devs were complaining that the original playstation will kill the game industry because the dev costs of the game will be to high and only a few companies will make profit.

...And this is exactly why I've been worried about the next gen for quite a while now. That is also why I think it could be the PC and handhelds that have a bright future.

PC development is in far greater trouble than console development, at least for the non-mainstream PC gaming community.  DRM is so rampant that there are literally horror stories told about the effort necessary just to get recently released games to run on PC nowadays.  Pissing off a sizeable chunk of your customers is never a good way to stay alive, but pissing off practically ALL of your customers is a phenomenally worse thing to do.

Right but those mainly are teams that are releasing those big blockbusters that sell most on the HD consoles (where other companies suffer because of average sales) and some of their games have much bigger budgets then average HD game, plus most of them are part of a larger company that still loose money overall.

"Ugh not this crap again.... You hear this every generation. Devs were complaining that the original playstation will kill the game industry because the dev costs of the game will be to high and only a few companies will make profit."

You don't hear this every gen, and the developers with the PS1 did get around that by not spending too much. A lot of them are spending too much this gen.

In the Playstation and PS2 generation it was pretty fair to define the arguments as "crap" because only smaller weaker companies were going out of business, and for every developer that died two took its place ... Today most large publishers are reporting record revenues and record losses which can only happen if your development and marketing expenses are out of control.

Leaving aside whether a dozen counter-examples are enough to refute a much wider trend I do feel compelled to point out a few things about this list.

The first two developers you listed are almost certainly making money because of, not in spite of, the higher HD costs. Epic's bread and butter is selling middle-ware, while Valve's making a killing off having other publishers use their digital distribution system (charging full price without manufacturing/storing/shipping physical media, or giving retailers a cut? Yes please!).

Infinity Ward and Harmonix have the incalculabe advantage of creating two of the hottest properties this generation. There aren't a whole lot of studios that can crank out a 10 million+ selling game series, or one which can sell millions of copies despite costing nearly two hundred bucks to get the full set.

Many of the others you've listed are developers who are fully-funded by either Sony or Microsoft. I have to wonder how well they'd have fared if they had to swim on their own.

The last three you've listed haven't released a single title yet, although let's be honest here, their games are going to make moolah. But again, we can say this ahead of time because they've got massive name recognition behind them. Precious few developers know that they're guaranteed multi-platinum sales years before the games release.

None of this is to say that an independent developer can't do well on the HD system, mind you. But I don't think that's the assertion. The thread is trying to say that most developers haven't done well on the systems (not because of a lack of sales, but because of insane development costs). To use the obvious analogies, Wal-Mart, Campbell, ExxonMobile, and a few others are America companies who are doing well: recession overated confirmed?

So I don't know a complete list of developers... sue me Max!

Its not the big games which are costing the industry, its the middling games by middling developers which release and barely make a ripple of sales. Its those developers which need to find focus and direction, and hopefully some of them at least will develop for the Wii where production with a 30-50man team is infinately easier to do than a 120-150 member production.

There are far too many average me-too developers, far too many "engineer" lead companies like Factor 5 and Lair which don't have the creative talent to make a fun game around the technology demo. Too many would rather play the Icarus and fly too close to the sun only to have their wax wings melt and fall to the earth.