Just as Mr. Carmack goes and praises the future potential of the Xbox 360, a report is released in Japan revealing the current Xbox as the most expensive platform to develop for. It's by quite some margin to top it off; on average it costs $1.82 million to develop a game for the Xbox in comparison to $822,000 for a PS2, GC or PSP game. Now since this is coming from Japan, the fact that the PS2 is much more common in that country will have something to do with it (economies of scale etc). As such these numbers are probably not representative of other gaming markets of Europe and America. It'd be very interesting to see a global survey of how much it costs to make games in different places. If Joystiq editor Vladimir Cole was around right now he'd probably say something like; "In Russia, the games don't pay you, you pay the games".
