Roughly, what is the budget for a big name video game ?

something which is on a few different platforms

are we looking at 10million ? more ?

I'd say on big-name games you're in the ballpark, especially ones like sports games that have to license a lot of their material. I'd say for a majority of them it may be slightly less than $10 million.

I believe Final Fantasy VII was around $35 mil, and Good God does it show.

I wonder about something like Metal Gear Solid.. anyone?

New graphics engine costs money, part 2's usually cost a lot less.

Subquestion; how much would an equivalent of a 2-d sega platform game from ten years ago cost to make today?

Here's an old quote from http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.e...w/numbers.html

N'Gai Croal, "The Art of the Game," Newsweek, March 6, 2000, p. 61
"The average budget to produce a game on Sega's Genesis on the '90s was about $200,000. For today's PlayStation and Nintendo 64, it's around $2 million. Many designers expect development costs for a PlayStation 2 game to jump to at least $4 million."