On Kotaku Live Radio today at 1:00 p.m. EDT, I called in and was able to ask a question directly to Stig Asmussen, Game Director at Sony Santa Monica for God of War III. I was so nervous!
B.T.: Stig, hope to see you at E3 this year, sir. Looking forward to God of War III. My question deals with budget size and game title quality. The reported budget for God of War III is $44 million. Do you feel that a higher budget, as a standard, produces a higher quality title? Or does it depend more on the team’s talent and support from the hardware manufacturer?”
That’s a summary of the question, not a direct verbatim quote of what I actually said. First, it must be noted that Stig commented and said that “Pittsburgh is a great city”. 
Representing!
Stig answered very well and obviously said that dollars doesn’t always equate to quality, an answer I already expected. But he did say he thought it was a great question and it allowed him to talk about his team and their combined talents more. I wanted him to answer this so the listening community could hear that it’s definitely not a huge development and/or marketing budget to make a great game, it takes talent and dedication.
The hour-long show will be archived at Kotaku.com at some point per this quote from Kotaku’s article:
We’ll also continue to provide direct downloads of the show a couple of hours after showtime each Wednesday.
Here’s the URL to the MP3 file, hosted by Kotaku. My question hits at 27:40, but the over-chatter cut off some of my question:
http://67.72.16.166/wins/2262569.mp3