Does Edge magazine do game postmortems? I may have to subscribe if it does.

Resistance FOM and Ratchet&Clank had 2 years of development time...?
does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. I think it has two seperate articles, one for classics, and another for relatively-recent failed games.

Like I said in the OP, some devs are going to consider production and pre-production to not be the same thing.  I'll bet, for these two games, 2 years was the production time, and they probably both spent about a year in pre-production (i.e. initial design, concept art, game engine layout).  Usually the number of people involved in the pre-production phase is considerably smaller than the main production phase -- to the tune of < 1/4th (often much less) the number involved in the final phases of the project.

The R&C article mentioned that a good 30+ devs were shared with R:FoM.  They were developed in parallel, obviously.

 So 1 year pre-production and 1 year full production development for Resistance and R&C?

I believe that too.

Interesting.  Well, to answer your question, the magazine is called "GameDeveloper", and you can't merely subscribe to it, so most people have never seen it.

I was thinking 1 year pre- and 2 years full.  2 years total, for games which probably required a major engine rewrite, for a platform which didn't exist until late in the dev cycle, seems unreasonable to me.

I'd put most HD games in the 3-ish year range, for overall time, unless they are somehow exceptional (like Killzone 2, with its fancy rendering tec hniques), or they are a same-platform sequel, which require less time (like 18-24 months).

you timeline is way off. its impossible for insomniac to of been in development with fom for 2 years. dev kits werent made availble till06 and i dont think sony had some for a considerable longer time. also fom was rushed to be a launch title and lacked polish.

You didn't even read the OP, did you?

R:FoM was developed on PCs, and ported to the PS3 after the devkits came out.  The article, written by none other than Insomniac themselves, says so.  Its ridiculous to believe that an engine, written in C++ and OpenGL, couldn't be easily ported to the PS3.  R:FoM may not have used the SPEs much, thanks to its launch-title nature, but the PPE is no slouch by itself.