Sure, but I'd imagine the bulk of that is spent on things that don't really matter in the context of kids making a game for themselves.
How much of that cost comes from sound, fairly slick graphics and animation, and the iterative polish needed to make a good game into a great one. I suspect that those things account for the bulk of the development cost.
The standards of polish for a hit game are far removed from what matters for getting kids into programming. The past generations making their text adventures didn't, for the most part, need to match the quality of Zork, and the current generation doesn't need to match Angry Birds. The point is to get them far enough that they could make something kinda sorta like it.
How much of that cost comes from sound, fairly slick graphics and animation, and the iterative polish needed to make a good game into a great one. I suspect that those things account for the bulk of the development cost.
The standards of polish for a hit game are far removed from what matters for getting kids into programming. The past generations making their text adventures didn't, for the most part, need to match the quality of Zork, and the current generation doesn't need to match Angry Birds. The point is to get them far enough that they could make something kinda sorta like it.