If I were a shareholder or owner of the game developer that mentions something like that, I would take the guy in charge and smack him against a wall. Head first. Twice. Then ask him what the f%&§ he thinks he is doing, blowing my money like that producing games he knows wont amortize, then tell him to stop the sh&% and invest all budgets and resources in making games for systems that actually make me money. oh, and then I would smack him against the wall again, just to make my point clear. 

Gears of War cannot be compared to other AAA PS3 and 360 titles because Epic used their own Unreal Engine 3. Any other developer has to either build their own engine (effing expensive) or license another strong engine (still pretty effing expensive).

The numbers I have heard (and as others have pointed out, there are a great many acceptions) for high-end games are:

Wii: 5-10 Million
360: 15-20 Million
PS3: 20-25 Million (with truly humongous, graphics-hungry games costing upwards of 30 Million....looking at you K2)

Halo 3 allegedly cost $30 million in development plus $30 million in marketing and post-launch bonuses for developers. So $60 million total for this one, but this is an unusual title in terms of marketing as I'm sure you know ;)

Another question for this thread, how much cost to implement online play to games?

I imagine that some tweaks need to be done to the game to make it online playable so it needs more development time and maintaining the online servers must cost some too...

I say this because there are games like bomberman for wii that won't have online play (yet) and some people are angry about it...

For good online play, the game has to be designed for online play from scratch. Online play is rarely something you can implement as an afterthought, or lag and shitty experience will result. Note that this doesn't mean the single player mode has to suffer or be different due to this, just that it often shares a lot of code with the multiplayer portion. As an example, Quake (the first really good online multiplayer FPS), when ran in single player mode, was still running as Client-Server, with the particularity that the server is running on the same machine and there's just one player on the server.

Having said that, and from what I know, the cost of implementing the online play itself is not that high, a few network programmers and testers are enough. The real cost is implementing and maintaining the infrastructure (servers, customer support, etc), and that cost is higher on the PS3 than the 360. This is because on the 360, Microsoft handles the whole infrastructure for the company (i.e. Xbox Live). On the PS3, I believe each developer is responsible for implementing their own servers, which means they can either absorb those costs or charge their customers for them. I'm not sure how it works on the Wii because I haven't seen any reference to that.

Dev costs can range as much as you want them to....Just depends on what you want.

Typically, the costs look like:

Wii: 4m-20m USD
X360: 8m-35m USD
PS3: 14m-40m USD.

It really just varies on what kind of resources you want to pull into a game: I doubt Beautiful Katamari for the X360 was made for more than $5m, whereas I honestly doubt Twilight Princess or Super Mario Galaxy was made for under $15m (probably more than $20m).

But on average, I'd put it at $8m for a "typical" Wii game, $14m for a typical X360 game, and $19m for a typical PS3 game.

Therefore, the breakdowns would look like:

Wii: 266,000 games sold @ $30 Profit
X360: 373,000 games sold @ $37.50 Profit
PS3: 542,000 games sold @ $35 Profit

Profit is defined as retailer wholesale minus console licensing fees.

 That's hard to say, Nintendo usually doesn't use huge teams to make their games and everyone is in house.  I would expect that their games would be cheaper to make then that.

Actually, developing a game like SMG is much, much higher than that. Super Mario 64 was above $15m USD in 1995-6.

As some of you guys have said it all depends on the man hours going into making the game, there is no set amount. Some PS1 games were over 30mil to make. The first year games for a system always cost more, you need to buy all the dev kits and engines and tech to make the games, while later games will be cheap to make. Once you have the basic stuff games can be made for under 10mil, just like Gears of War.

Unfortunately I don't have the link to the exact article I am referring to I read it months ago, and am not in the habit of stockpiling links. Further more I read it through a link from another site, but it was a interview with an established developer about how many units they have to sell through to turn a profit on each console. I suppose you can spend the hours digging if you so desire.

Both the Wii, and PS3 numbers are sited often enough. Unfortunately this was the only time I saw average development costs attributed to the 360. The problem with the 360 is often a AAA game is being calculated as two games rather then one. Since the console and PCs very much share the same architecture.

I am also relatively certain that this material has been posted numerous times on these very forums. Quite frankly I am stunned at anyone thinking the 360 is just as expensive to develop for as the PS3. One has been on the market a year, has more established development tools, and shares common architecture with more common technology. While the other is relatively new, has fewer development tools, and is rather unique. Hell developers had to invest in special training for the hardware. They had to send their coders out to take courses.

Anyway I could have sworn I posted this particular article to this site at some point.