To expand on this:

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Monday, February 18, 2013, 15:05 (4296 days ago) @ stan

Activision isn't betting lightly on Destiny. It just dawned on me how ridiculously ballsy this whole thing is.

Normal AAA game budgets can be in the range of a few tens of millions of dollars. For instance, Uncharted 2 officially had a budget of $20M. Sometimes big ones run higher, every once in a while several times higher.

Destiny is being developed by a studio of 350 people over the course of several years. That alone means we're easily looking at upper tens of millions. Once everything else that happens in the development of a AAA game is taken into account, including contracting other studios, a final development budget of well over $100M would not be shocking. If so, Destiny would be very close to the top of the list of most expensive game development projects ever.

And Destiny is not an established name.

And it's a game that nobody seems quite sure how to even categorize.

And Activision and Bungie have laid out a 10-year plan for it.

I have no idea what Destiny is, but the ambition of the project is mind-blowing. There's a reason Bungie talked about being bigger than Halo in that vidoc: they're trying to capture a ton of lightnings in their bottles, and at some level they sort of have to.