I worked out that they got around $40 IIRC from the gears article on forbes. Basicly just use the materia costs and retail expenditure.

now that the per copy sold aguement is squashed does someone want to try to reasonably figure out a game with a 3.5 year development times budget to 60million?

and none of that 'need to pay office rent and dev kits' bullshit to boost your figures either cause guess what... they are still renting those offices and still have those devkits... and im fairly certain KZ2 isnt still in development

Very easily, if a team is made of 120 people, and outsourcing parts of the development to other teams (as KZ2 did with AI if I remember correctly). The industry standard for cost per person (all things included, not just salary) is $100,000 per year.

120 * $100,000 * 3.5 years = $42 million for development alone. Maybe the team was smaller than 120 people at some points, but then some parts were outsourced, so...

Advertising budget was $3 million for UK alone, so $10-20 million worldwide is not a stretch. Which makes $50 million a likely budget, and $60 million possible.

Do you have other estimates?

Is 100k really the average? What about all the testers, etc. I know they make

$100k is the whole cost of having a person on a team, not just the salary. Look at the graph from Factor 5 with development costs:

http://i32.tinypic.com/10glffn.jpg

100-people teams make a game for around $20 million, and this is most likely for games which are developed in 18-24 months, not the ones which are developed for very long like Killzone 2.

^ the team was smaller and for 6months there was Killzone Liberation in development. Also game went gold early and KZ2 got pushed back in favor of R2. Judging by the preview build they released they were pretty much telling the truth and the game was pretty much finished. Towards end of development you dont need a full team of workers anymore so im willing to bet for a good part of the last year the team was lower than 120... also the first 6 months...

so for 1.5 years i'll give you 95 employees with 2.5 years with every employee.

"Explain your numbers!!  Well, those numbers don't make sense if I ignore your explanation and wildly speculate!!  I am only asking you to explain in the hopes that you can't, and I can cuddel back up in my shelter of fanboy nonsense!!"

Fuck KZ2 is an awesome game!

I have a better estimate.

GoW IIIs budget is $40,000,000 apparantly and KZ2 is less than that. (Something I saw a while ago, so sorry no linkies)