Just remember BMaker: they're laughing with you, WITH you.

I don't care what sarcasm you guys toss at me. This is coming from Reggie himself, not me

I'm not being sarcastic. I'm trying to have a real, on-the-level conversation with you. Ignore noname and everyone for a minute. This is just you and me. Okay?

Answer Khuutra's question. I don't know why he's bothering with you, but if you go along you might learn something. Maybe.

Ok, Mario Galaxy and Gears at $16 million. But those are first party games, meaning the money made at retail go straight to the publisher. These 3rd party games, however cheap crappy they may be, only get a fraction of the money from retail, because some of that money has to go to the system creator (Sony, M$, Ninty), so logically, they'd have to sell more copies in order to turn a profit for the developer

Well, if you combine that number with claims from third party publishers like EA that HD console games cost 3 to 4 times as much as Wii games then you have to conclude that games like Little Big Planet, Ratchet and Clank and Killzone 2 are all major flops.

Actually Gears of War is said to have cost $10 million:

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/02/interview_epics.html

However this is a very rare budget for a HD game, for two reasons:

1- It doesn't include engine development or licensing (since Epic used their own engine)
2- Parts of the game development were outsourced to Epic China (a subsidiary that Epic opened there).

It surely doesn't include marketing either.

That's very sensible and I am glad that you said it, but let's go a bit slower here. You're getting ahead of me. Gears of War is a third-party game with an exclusivity contract, not first-party. Mario Galaxy is first-party, I know.

Let's look at Mario Galaxy - 16 million is pretty expensive for a Wii game, right? That probably took more than a million to reach profit, right?

The reason I make this comparison is that in most cases, publishers pay for the entirety of the development of a game, and then take all the money that proceeds from retail sales until such a time as profit has been made, after which the developer gets royalties. So it comes to the same thing in terms of how many games are needed to turn a profit. Right?

I didn't mean to turn this into two questions, and will keep it narrower from here on out.

Granted and conceded, but that's why I'm talking about Mario Galaxy rather than Gears - Epic's games are very confusing in terms of absolute cost.

 i did as well *sigh*