How much do the FIFA/Madden games cost to develop?

[Kid_Icarus55]

Yeah so, I got into an argument with my brother recently about the price of those sports-games that update every year. I argued that they where overpriced because they only need a fraction of the development time of a big multi-year-development title ,like for example Mass Effect 2.
He mentioned that the licensing of the teams and such could not be cheap.

Since we could not come to an end and could not find any stuff with Google, except a bit of an article on Wikipedia that says FIFA has a lower licensing cost than Madden, I decided to ask you guys if anyone could give me a hint on how big the budget for your average FIFA/Madden game is?

 

[emeraldrafael]

Well, I know you have to pay every player to use their names (which is part of the reason why you dont have named players in College games). Plus you hae to pay to use team logos, stadium names, etc. etc. etc. So its not exactly cheap, plus you have the costs of production of the raw materials that go into the CD and data embedding and all that jazz, and they're exceedingly costly.

Honestly, I would say its less to make a game like Mass Effect cause then you're not dealing with people who have Unions like Football players do.