Mikeofthelivingdead - I was basing that 90K figure on the total average cost of employing 1 person for 1 year. I'm basing that on EGM a few years back though, when they used to run a monthly feature on various jobs in the industry, they always had an average salary listed. 90,000 per year was actually at the high end, if I recall correctly most of the jobs they covered in that series made closer to 50,000 a year. As well, a very large portion of the final staff for any bigger game, again, especially one that was made this quickly is going to be testing. Testers don't make much in a year and are mostly temporary contract workers, hired for a 2 or 3 month stint to get a game as polished as possible before it has to go gold. It's not like they're free but they're making perhaps 6000$ each in those 3 months they get a job. Even if you hired 100 of them you'd only be paying a million dollars or so WITH accounting for any extra insurance or taxes and what have you.
Now, any big game , especially one rushed out in just a couple years like DS2 was , is going to have substantial crunch time costs. So who knows, maybe more people worked on it than I assume ? perhaps THQ just blew money left right and center on it because they knew they'd be going bankrupt anyway so who cares
That bankruptcy listing someone else posted here , seems to indicate that the game actually cost about 79 million dollars to make yet it managed 2.4 million in sales and ended up losing 500,000$ for THQ. I'm guessing a large portion of those sales were from discounts and retailers sending back excess copies. Plus, it was developed for 4 platforms in the end. I guess if it cost 20 million to make the game and then an additional 5 million to port it each time then it could have conceivably cost 35 million by the time the wii U version went gold. Not unheard of to think they spent 45 million marketing it , advertisements are expensive if you want to bombard every form of media for more then just a few days or a couple ads.
I think it's quite simply a case of THQ not having many eggs left in their basket- they HAD to spend a ton of money and hope that promotion and marketing would lead to a large return on investment or they were finished. As it turns out they made some money on their last few games overall but not enough to pay off their debts as quickly as they needed to. Darksiders was just one game that they desperately needed to sell 5 million copies at full price. They would then have doubled their investment but going by what I recall their massive debt was , they needed like 12 games to do that just to keep the creditors at bay for a year or 2. They only ended up with 3 or 4.
