10 milion cutscenes ?

Yes. Yes it is.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not saying the intro cost 10 mil. But cutscenes are EXTREMELY expensive.

Don't the civ leaders have "cutscenes" too?

Best cut seens are for blizzard games! even the old diablo game has great one.

Warhammer ones tend to be high quality as well. Dawn of war, mark of chaos, warhammer online and so on.

I do miss it in games. Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft have them and they were great.

That's a bit hilarious when you win the 10 or more hours struggle and all you get is static picture with 'Victory, 45 points' info:( 

The last couple of good C&C games had good cutscenes. Tiberian Sun was a masterpiece of storytelling. C&C 3 didn't do bad either. I guess I am still in shock over the 4th one... god damn you to hell foul EA!

Yes it was depressing getting that at the end of along Sins game.

I don't see why cut scenes should cost so much either.. A lot of the times you don't even have to use the engine to make them.  No AI to put in, ragdoll effects etc.

Nah Wintersong, it's not pre calculated but real 3D models calculated by the engine.

Cutscenes really don't do it for me.   SC2 had a few good ones, but nothing that I couldn't do without.  I like metrics rather than pretty, both are even better.

Major milestone cutscenes/graphics and end game metrics.  I do like the end of open ended rpg's where they do the drawings/static images with the voiceover giving the decisive fallout - i.e. i saved town x, now town x is thriving.  Better yet, my goody two shoes saved town x, which then went on to become the local tyrant and enslave everyone in the area...oops.

Cutscenes are overrated in strategy games. I would much rather have graphs and a timeline that can show how events moved and altered the maps's control. I love have Civ IV does it where you can watch the nations volley for control like opposing amebas trying to devour each other.

My opinion is that time and money are limited resources in the production of any game.  If a large chunk of both goes towards making something I will watch maybe once and then hit escape to skip ever after... well that's a waste of both and I wish they had put that time and money into making the game (mechanics, replay value, complexity, stability, etc...) better instead.

That's why I'm happy that they made only an intro for Civ5, without making wonder & victory movies, so they could focus their resources on gameplay-related elements. The result is not flawless, but much better than Elemental IMO. Firaxis had much more money than Stardock, and it shows.

I think warcraft 3 had it just right. Use the videos for the truly epic moments, those events that really changed everything. Even if I just watch it once, I'll never forget it.

It helps that WC3 movies were good enough to make those moments feel appropriately epic. If I understand it correctly, the idea behind high quality (and budget) movies is that they can be used in trailers and other promotional material to generate hype and partially recovers themselves (although how effective is subjective). This is, of course, IF you can pull it off and make really nice movies. Let's face it, even if SD tries to put in some effort for movies in Elemental, it wouldn't be much better than the ones in GC2, which were fairly... "bleh". I'd rather have them spend that money elsewhere.

To the OP, in addition, civ V has 'cinematic' of of world leaders in diplomatic screen, which is movie based rather than real time polygons.