Ubisoft is a pretty smart company. And they make some great games..

Like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic :P

In the end it would just lead people to developers who have the Nintendo philosophy. I think Microsoft and Sony perfectly realize this and they won't make as powerful hardware as this article indicates.

$60m is just ridiculous, even $20m is slightly high. Games would need to sell at least 2m to break even, which is just far too high for sustainability

I don't know... but I smell opertunity here for middleware companies... they've been fucking around with bullshit for a while now and only a few have been actually helping with development outside of physics and graphic engines. Stuff like SpeedTree I think is the future of middleware. Imagine if you're a company who developes a middleware that can create dynamic buildings based on a wireframe model that the developer makes. He would chose the type of building(brick... morter... wood... ect.) and it would then create that type of building.... you could theoreticly create massive suburbian sections outside your city in a fraction of the time. And a middleware road program as well that works side by side with havok. There really is a lot of potential in the market.

An interesting thing can be observed in most households with young children the week after Christmas ...

While they spent weeks or months begging for the most expensive, heavily advertized and newest toys on the market they enjoy playing with the toy's boxes more than the toys; and the classic toys their older relatives give them seem to get much more steady playtime than the latest and greatest toys.

The push for larger epic experiences are driving development costs higher, but good simple videogames are not that expensive to make and people still really enjoy them.

That is all subjective and down to the individual person.

No way that means game would cost $100 or more. Just keep todays hardware.

Um $60M? With performance like that they could probably take pictures of everything and anything in 3 dimensions and just import them straight into the games without going to the trouble of actually doing much 3d modeling.

So Miyamoto was right? Makes you wonder how many Bionic Commandos will need to fall over before someone starts explaining why not everything has to be in HD. Why does every remake have to be upgraded?

If the film industry taught me anything its that low budget productions make more interesting, creative and original work. This is prob. why the Wii got Deadly Creatures, de Blob, etc and why Viva Pinata just didn't make enough money back.