GTA and Crackdown creator David Jones was recently quoted as saying "Crackdown wasn't that long ago and our development budget was something like USD 20* million, and even that to me now, I don't know if I could do anything for much less than that."

20* million dollars!?!??! Thats pretty insane.

Could this be an opportunity for Indie game developers? With this growing cost trend, if indie developers can come in and under-cut the costs of bigger game development companies, they could stand to gain some serious market share. There are also many new ways to distribute games in cost effective ways (like bittorrent) without needing to go through the rigmarole of getting a boxed version in Wal-Mart.

I suppose the biggest question is this: Is that 20-50 million dollars spent actually making a better game or is most of it bloated waste that customers never notice?

Most of the games I am playing right now (CoD4, WoW, etc) ARE big budget games, so I can't really argue that the money that was spent on them during development was not worth it. Can anyone give us a few examples of indie games that have done really well?

*David Jones later corrected the budget number from $50 to 20 million.

GamesIndustry.biz