Keeping a company light on its toes by keeping the core creative staff small and outsourcing the fiddly bits is how Wideload Games is approaching the problem of rising game development costs. Gamecock is taking the same approach to publishing, according to interviews with Wideload's Alex Seropian at GameSpot and with Gamecock's CEO Mike Wilson at Next-Generation.

Of course, in amongst all this news about cocks and chimps is a tidbit about Halo and Halo 2:

Now they are saying [games will cost] $20 or $30 million on the new platforms. Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne—all of these games cost under $5 million to make. And then Halo 2 cost like $22 million to make, because as soon as it [catches on with] one of these huge companies, they just can’t help themselves—everybody in the company wants to attach themselves to the game and basically all this overhead gets attached to the game.

How relevant this idea of people in a company "attaching themselves" to a project seems specious to me with regards to Halo 2; after all, Bungie is segregated from the rest of Microsoft in their own building and has been now for quite awhile. Perhaps there are too many Microsoft cooks spoiling the soup and inflating the budget, but $15 million worth? That's a big chunk of change. And whether or not there's truth to the idea that popular sequels attract unwanted expenses, it's still hard not to admire the desire to keep costs down. Now, if that only meant a decrease in the price of the actual games...