Say Sony got back $30 for every copy sold then not even a million sales would be needed in order to break even, with advertising, price cuts for the game maybe 1.5 million. Uncharted 2 barely made a profit as many sales came from Platinum and bundles, will be interesting to see how the second one fares.

I would be extremely shocked if GT5 did not have at least 3x that budget, realistically 4x seems more likely with the manpower and dev cycle behind that game.

I think that GT5 is a different example, which costs are very difficult to acertain.

Reason I say this is that we can look into what's actually involved in Prologue vs. the full version. Is GT5 just.......More of the same? This is a very important question, as it's critical to 'figuring out' what the GT5 budget is.

On one hand, the GT5P and GT5 Full costs could be shared: GT5P cost very little to make if it was a spinoff of GT5, and all that costed was some simple development time of taking what was ready for GT5 and porting it to a Prologue, or if the full GT5 had a lot of fundemental work that was different.

The likely scenario is that GT5P used a significant amount of assets from GT5 Full, and cost very little to make, so it earned Sony a large amount of profit, to offset whatever massive costs GT5 took to make (I'd think around $50m for GT5 + $5m for Prologue, or a little less).

That 60 million figure is a rumor and it's probably less, also if it did cost 60 million Sony gets about 30 bucks a game so to break even it'd need to sell a maximum of 2 million.

if i remember Sony CEO said that their big ps3 projects have to sell average 1mln copies to break even -  after all they not only spent money on development, but also on production and advertisment(which cost probably 1/2 of total development budget).

GT5:P I feel & LBP are cashc ows for them ATM