During a discussion of the recent shutdown by EA of Bioware, the famous studio behind game franchises like Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age (and, more relevant, three huge bombs over the past decade in the latter two), Jason Schreier of Bloomberg states that

* Gears of War: E-Day, the newest entry in Xbox's also famous franchise, cost Microsoft $500 million dollars to develop

* "that is a real number, it's real". There had been a lot of talk, mostly by fans of the franchise (of which I would include myself), that the rumored $400 million+ figure for the game was greatly exaggerated. Apparently not.

E-Day has had laughably low player count figures on Steam. <https://steamdb.info/app/3010850/charts/> While it is true that most players are going to play via Xbox Game Pass on console or PC, for such an expensive game to develop, the player count still implies catastrophically disappointing customer reception.

It's the corporate approach to game development, which should be creative driven. I think it's really hard for a large company to remain creative, it grows in bureaucracy and non-contributors by default.