Larian Studios - Million Units Manual - on why games are expensive to make

Swen Wincke from Larian Studios has updated his blog with a post,
http://www.lar.net/2012/06/23/the-million-units-manual/
this time about some of the difficulties theyre trying to overcome when creating the rpg that will dwarf them all.
http://www.lar.net/2012/01/16/the-route-to-the-very-big-rpg-that-will-dwarf-them-all/

PS: I apologize for the links shown as real link not as embbed within the text but for some reason, the link button doesn't work for me...

A quote then

If you have a 40 man team, and the employer cost is say 6K€, then one year of development will cost you 2,88M€. Given that most games take a few years to make, this means you rapidly end up with a need of over 5M€ to fund one game. That means that if you want to fund your own game with work for hire, and your game needs 40 people for 2 years at 6K€/month, you need to earn 5M€ before you can afford to spend 2 years on your own game. So, if you do work for hire for 2 years for somebody else with your 40 man team, you need to earn 10M€ to actually earn the freedom needed to develop your own thing.  In the current market, that’s actually a tough proposition and rare are the jobs in the games industry where you are paid double the employee rate, so the reality is that you probable need to do even more work for hire.