Hollywood loves talking money — salaries, budgets, you name it. The game industry doesn't.
Some developers have been very open about how much their titles cost to produce. Other developers have not revealed their budgets. As Kotaku mentioned earlier when posting the Digital Battle.com list of games with the biggest budgets: "The sticky part of video game budgets is that some developers will not confirm the actual budgets, and there is some speculation in these numbers."
Metal Gear Solid 4 producer Ken Imaizumi has stated that the claim that the PS3 exclusive cost $60 million is incorrect.
"It's being written in recent news that MGS4's budget was over 5 billion [yen] or 7 billion [yen]," Imaizumi tweeted. "It didn't cost that that much." If it cost that much, Imaizumi added, the game would've become multi-platform.
Then how much did it cost?
Reuters indirectly quoted former Kojima Productions Associate Producer Ryan Payton as saying that the game was so expensive to develop, that it needed to sell a million copies on launch day to turn a profit. (Payton later stated that he had been misquoted, and that the information was incorrect.)
Then, that brings me back to: How much did it cost? Movie producers and directors have no problem talking about how much was spent on making a feature film and neither should game developers.
Kotaku has reached out to Kojima Productions for a comment.
(今泉) kojima_pro [Twitter]