The budget for PD is more or less the total they spent working on for the last 6 years. That includes the 4 games they have released after 2006 and they made more than their money back. T10 have only released 2 games in that time and achieved about half the sales with a development team twice the size at minimum and with less platforms or games to work on. Turn 10 are about 10 years old so they are hardly new.
From what I
read, GT5 had a budget of a rough 60 million - and this isn't talking about PD, but about GT5. So, I fail to see why you're considering PD to be somewhat of the underdog in this comparison. I really don't get that.
That is why you see Sony let PD do what they want to as they are highly successful, still the biggest selling exclusive game for the platform and have low costs like the rest of the studios.
Low costs?! Like, three times the budget of Killzone 2? That's what you're calling 'low cost'? I'm sorry, we must have completely differing standards as to what is lo cost and what isn't.
I wouldn't be surprised if Turn 10 are making a loss at present as they are the up there as probably, one of the biggest gaming studios if not the biggest.
I highly, highly doubt that. There are franchises that don't evens ell a fraction of what Forza sells, and they're still around. I won't by your idea that a developer, who's pushing multi-million sellers like T10 does, doesn't create revenue. Unless, of course, you've got a source to back that one up. Let's also keep in mind that Forza might be more valuable to MS as a system seller than it is as an individual game, to sink their teeth into a market they'd otherwise won't get ahold off.
It does not matter though as Microsoft will keep them running as long as a reasonable amount is being sold, at the moment no Halo levels required but in the future Microsoft might have different expectations and this could cause Turn 10 problems.
It could? Well, why? Fable III, for example, didn't even reach four million units sold - if anytrhing, that'd get the cut first, no?
The content gap between GT and FM will continue to grow unless big changes are made at PD to put them up there and currently some changes are being made like relocating. The fact of the matter is we are in 2011, Turn 10 have been working on the series since 2001 with most likely double the staff levels at all times compared to PD. That is the reason why they have catched up and succeeded GT series for car count and overall detail in them cars. The track count will also get bigger.
You know, I'd attribute that more to the misuse of that huge budget. I don't know what PD spend it on, but it is an insane amount of money. If they didn't bother to increase their employee count, that's not some tragic fate, that's just bad resource management.
I wonder, though: Are Kazunori's racing adventured sponsored by PD? And probably included in GT5's budget?
In fact, before going about and claiming that the sole reason to PD's trouble is their man count, I'd think that it
might have to do something with their executive director running off to do whatever.
The gap can increase very largely very easily but if PD for example hired 500 more staff, they can pull it back the other way. It does not matter if your franchise was made in the PS1 generation, it does not give you 2-3 times more man power to make things and assets from that generation are obsolete.
It doesn't give you manpower, no. But what it does give you is a fanbase. People who are going to buy GT X no matter what. And creating such a fanbase was far easier for GT5 in the PS1 days as there was little to no competition for them. T10, on the other hand, have had to prove their worth against a hugely successful, established competition with an enormous fanbase, namely Gran Turismo.
If you fail to see how important such aa fanbase is for a game, then I doubt that thhere's much merrit in carrying on with this discussion.
Also didn't Forza 2 use the Forza 1 car assests and people say GT5 uses last gen cars when Turn 10 also did.
Look at the cars in FM2/FM3 and tell me they look the same as Forza 1's. They don't. T10 could very well have recycled their assets. But if they did, they made sure to hide that quite well. Look at FM3, for example. There are cars that have been ported, but there's not a single car without cockpit view. There's not a single car that has to rely on details that were textured on instead of modelled.
Recycling the old assets isn't the problem with GT5, it's the fact that the standard cars show it. They don't look like current gen, and if you want to make a case, go ahead and find some cars in FM3 that are of the same low quality as GT5's standard cars. I can assure you, you won't find something with roughly 5000 polys, textured details and without cockpit view in FM3, period.
Differnece is though Turn 10 are constantly remodelling to a different standard many times. Imagine if they made up their mind earlier on, it would have saved a lot of work. Every car might be now redone to AutoVista quality for FM5.
And then, what would happen then? Forza would start to suffer from the whole "future proving" that PD attempted. I don't want to end up with "standard cars" in Forza, because Dan got too pedantic about car detail that couldn't be used while racing, anyways. I'm kinda glad that T10 doesn't get carried away like that and work for the here and now, instead of trying to create cars for the PS3 when they're developing a PS2 game. Or creating PS4 cars when creating a PS3 games. I've seen PD fail at that, no need to see T10 do so, too.
SP figure, keep in mind that almost certainly will include digital downloads and they gave it away with PSP Go's when they were launched, which will amount for quite a few. 
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