Who says it has to be all or nothing? There's no reason why Grand Theft Auto can't be an enormous undertaking. The point of contention is that not every game can do it. And most have proven that they shouldn't. If you want to put up Grand Theft Auto numbers you have to be Grand Theft Auto. We've seen that even popular IPs like Tomb Raider can't hit those numbers. But they don't seem to care. They keep overbudgeting these projects that have no hope of hitting their targets and then, when the games inevitably fall short, instead of looking at the obvious causes for their financial troubles they blame everything else under the sun like piracy and GameStop and look to squeeze out revenue through all kinds of other (arguably abusive) means. And it's causing more problems than its solving.
Nobody is saying you can't have your GTAs and CoDs. I want them just as much as the next guy. But there has to be some rationality. As much as people say the market is growing, it's not growing enough for games to regularly move 10 million units. Really, the creativity comes in with figuring out how to make a game under a reasonable budget without making it look like it was a reasonable budget. Spend where you need, cut where you can.
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