The Old Republic is a SMASH HIT...

[BloatedGuppy]

I'll just say this much; for 1 month straight, you could not go anywhere in Germany without seeing TOR posters. They were everywhere. Every German gaming website had a TOR banner up for at least 2 weeks and they had ads in every commercial break on almost every TV channel for 6 weeks. In addition to that they also hired so called viral marketers just for German forums.

Now take a second and think how much that would cost. Just that. Then multiply it by 20, since they utilized this aggressive marketing in more than just one (relatively small) country. 500m is maybe a tad ridiculous, but if you told me 300m was the answer, I wouldn't doubt it too much.

Battlefield 3, which was also a flagship game for EA (arguably much moreso than TOR, given the size of the demographics involved), and their marketing budget came in just above $50M. That they would spend 6 times that on TOR seems...unlikely. Again, I'm willing to believe 50M, and for the sake of aggressively conservative estimates I'd be willing to accept 100M, but anything above that seems pretty pie in the sky. I'd say the rough 250M estimate for TOR (development + marketing) is fair. Even that makes it one of the most outrageously expensive games of all time.