Comment by pavlov

Are you forgetting that the upfront price for software used to be a lot higher than it is today?

You’re talking about times before 2010 and an EA game, but that’s not the right comparison. These Desert Ant AI models are an SDK, a professional middleware library. Licensing that kind of software in the pre-2010 days used to cost tens of thousands of dollars.

In other words, the proper comparison here is the various libraries that EA licensed to make the game, not the game itself.