How much does it cost to make a new game?

Mass-produced adventure games were altogether completely different from mass-produced shooters. When the first solid FPS's, like Turok, came around, they offered the production value no adventure game of the same period could possibly compete with anymore. The adventure genre completely failed to update itself, with perhaps the exception of the Myst series, which btw was a great success in a time where the rest of the genre was already showing signs of decay. Grim Fandango, which I consider to have the best damn story ever written for a game, was terribly produced as far as game mechanics are concerned.

The comparison is easy enough to make with Hollywood. As much of a Star Wars fan as I may be, this movie, along with Spielberg and Lucas in general, are all single-handly responsible for the complete switch of style over substance in american cinema. You just take the summer of 1982. The Thing and Blade Runner were superior movies to E.T., but both didn't stand much of a chance against Spielberg's extraordinary sense of production, and in a sense, rightly so. As much as I despise the terrible movies that lesser directors brought us to emulate his success, he did at the same time rise the bar for production value in general. It has taken the industry about twenty years to catch up, but we are now seeing action movie/drama hybrids with an extremely high production value, such as Batman Begins and later The Dark Knight, that managed to bring a much more theatrical cast and make action movies with them. This hybrid style marks the return, for me, to Hollywood's golden age, and it's a sign that good things can come out of a terrible situation. And the success of those movies shows that when you combine both style AND substance, you can make a kickass production that also speaks to you and doesn't take you for an idiot.

The same is true for games in general. We may never see a full-on adventure game again, but there are interesting hybrid possibilities, as shown by Deus Ex and Max Payne, where we could slow down the action and bring out the story and adventure aspect a notch or two, all wrapped in a high production value. If two or three of those titles were to simultaneously come out, the so-called market would change very suddenly. As to what it takes for them to do it? I don't know. I guess we have to count on some 30-year old game devs to suddenly be nostalgic of that era enough to mass-produce it again, with a 21st century twist on it.