Therumancer said:
So basically what your saying is that you think they are actually spending tens of millions of dollars on a team of marketing guys? I'm sure they would probably be shocked to learn that.
See, as nice as it is to say "well if you saw the parking lot you'd agree with me" the bottom line is I can simply go by the numbers, and I'm sorry but "marketing" doesn't seem like a sensible answer to where all that money is going.
Instead of repeating myself I will just quote my earlier post:
oktalist said:
TV networks regularly charge hundreds of thousands of dollars just for a single 30 second slot in prime-time, so multiply that by the number of times it was shown, then multiply that by the number of countries the game was marketed in, and you begin to see that a large, global marketing campaign can cost a shitload.
The cost of advertising in print publications and online is less, but not by much.
Marketing for a Hollywood movie usually runs into the tens of millions, if not more.
I can't argue with the rest of your points; it's possible that there is a minority of people making much more money than they should be, just like in any other industry. But I note that all this has very little effect on the retail price of games; in capitalism, the retail price of a product is dependent on how much the [del]suckers[/del] people are willing to pay for it, not how much it cost to produce. So if you don't like the price of a game, just wait for it to come down, don't rant about how much the people who made it got paid, because that has nothing to do with the price you pay for it.
You still pay the same to see a movie, whether it's a $100 million blockbuster or a $100,000 independent job.