Single player campaign was beat in 5 hours? A speedrun, or a regular runthrough?
It's absurd how much money these FPS games, or any console/"AAA" game supposedly costs -- it's questionable to say the least.
Seriously, though, I doubt it takes more than 10 hours at most to beat the campaign (Multiplayer doesn't really add more content -- you just fight other players on a couple of maps, or custom made maps with basic FPS mechanics, but that's not related to this.)
200 people, 100 million dollars, 10 hours (At the most) content. How is it even possible to spend that much money on such a project? And why would they openly admit that a 5-10 hour FPS game is the most expensive game they've ever made? I'd expect a massive open world game, or atleast a game with a massive amount of content with that budget.
And yes, I'm not a big fan of the massively overbudgeted Hollywood movies. The bigger the budget, the more generalized (And mediocre.) the movie will be, because they want it to appeal to as many people as possible when they've invested so much money.
You don't just play Halo's campaign and then you're done with the game for good.
When I first got CE: I played through the game on Normal, then Heroic, then I had a bunch of friends come over and we played through on Normal, then Heroic, then we played HOURS of local multiplayer, then we played the game co-op on Legendary which took hours of passing the controllers around, then even more hours of local multiplayer, then I attempted to solo the game Legendary, then we had LAN parties every few weeks, and so on.
Then factor future additions to the series, such as internet multiplayer (adding hundreds of hours), Forge allowing for infinite custom gametypes and maps, Theater, Firefight, now Spartan Ops, the list goes on. The amount of time you can spend with a game isn't limited to how much concrete "content" is in the game, but rather the amount of fun you can have within the framework the game provides. Let's not forget that some of the undeniably best games ever made have been no more than a couple of hours long, but the "gameplay loops" there are so fun you don't mind doing them over and over and over and over for hundreds of hours.
Besides, you can't just equate content with money, it's not like "well, we can add fifty more quests, but it's going to cost us $50k, so we might be better off investing that $50k into getting us +50 graphics points"
