I'm a designer/project lead, but we have plenty of animators and I took the class in college (and hated it), so I know the job is difficult. One of the things we try to avoid to make their lives easier is collisions.

(Warning: This paragraph is going to bore most people becuase it is about how the sausage is made. Feel free to skip past it). However, it isn't as bad as you might think. There are anchors that you can use so that collisions hit their targets. Also, there are tools that can be created for animators that allow them to finish an animation with the average builds and then it fills in a projection of expected offsets with size differences, the animators then just have to watch the size differential animations and adjust the offsets if the predicting software got things wrong. Also, I think that this will have to be even more advanced to make things work more easily. . . basically, they should make new skeletons for petite, average, and very large versions of humans for each gender. Then each animation needs to have a version that works for each of these pairings and then run the offsets.

Also, a 5-year production cycle is ridiculous, but $200K/year is also super low. I think we spend that much on just maintaining the office (this includes a mortgage, ridiculous internet and electricity bills, travel costs, new computers, office supplies, and IT contractors - they are basically employees, - we are their only contract, but this allows them to have a smaller team and yet be on-call) but you take my point - running a game development team costs a lot. I'm sure this one would be much, much smaller and they could rent instead of buying an office and not cater lunch or give out bonuses, etc. but I still think a team of 3 artists, 2 coders, 10 animators, a project lead, and the lead's assistant (who is also HR and office manager), would cost your around $1 million/year, but you could probably launch in under two years (and you'd need to because launch comes with having to hire and train (or contract) support and hiring full-time QA at least six months before launch). I wouldn't try to do this project with less than $2 million. Then I'd launch it for $25/unit and my break-even would be at 80,000 copies sold. . . which is great if it is a big hit and it sells a million copies. I'd even have a free version that only lets you create your character and then it would have a loud announcer say that in the full version you can create your avatar's partners, but in the demo, you must face the wheel of potential partners. It would do like a game show and move the camera to introduce each of the "contestants" with some of them being ideal and others being whammies. Then it would give people only 5 minutes with them and then asking if they want to spin the wheel again or would they like to purchase the game. I think people might download it just for the fun of the demo and then they might decide to purchase it. The goal is to get it in homes and get people over the stigma because then you have an audience for your DLC. I think the initial product could make millions on it's own and then make tens of millions with DLC. . . for a relatively small investment.

But there is another issue that someone else brought up and it is the reason why I don't touch this. . . social stigma. I would proudly purchase and use this game, but I don't want to be known as the creator; in fact, the more research I do about this, the more I think this could be huge and that scares me because I think there would be a wikipedia page for all eternity with my name on it if I made this. Also, I am related to someone well known in the game industry and I'd be associating him and his business with this. . .

I don't know though. I might put together the game design and the business plan just to run it by him. . . I'm ambivalent too because I am not hurting to be a "success" and I love the games we're currently making. A project like this would mean employing a lot of people and I couldn't easily step away to go back and make "real" games too.