Original Post
I suggest this gets added to the FAQ. The FAQ for "Business of Game Development" points to this forum's FAQ for costs of console development kits. Spark's lawsuit ended up releasing a whole lot of information. Their contract worth USD$8.5M is available on Gamasutra along with legal review. Most interesting for the FAQ is this page giving the (Sept 2002) cost of dev kits: 
Note that IDEs and a few other developer tools are left off. I assume the contract covers obtaining current SDKs and compilers from the various manufacturers as part of the Devkit agreement. As usual, Nintendo seems the least expensive of the platforms to develop for. [grin] Also left out (for obvious reasons) are the art tools, Maya or 3DStudio licenses, audio tools, and asset chain / compilation tools. And the building, power, and other infrastructure. Nearly all of the remaining 8 million pays the salary for human beings to generate 50-100MB of source code and 20-40GB of source data.
Note that IDEs and a few other developer tools are left off. I assume the contract covers obtaining current SDKs and compilers from the various manufacturers as part of the Devkit agreement. As usual, Nintendo seems the least expensive of the platforms to develop for. [grin] Also left out (for obvious reasons) are the art tools, Maya or 3DStudio licenses, audio tools, and asset chain / compilation tools. And the building, power, and other infrastructure. Nearly all of the remaining 8 million pays the salary for human beings to generate 50-100MB of source code and 20-40GB of source data.
