While I agree that the EA style 150 man teams are almost certainly incredibly wasteful and could doubtless be smaller, there is no way a three man team will be able to produce a next gen game that meets the publishers expectations. In the current market their chances of getting cash out of a publisher are slim to none – unless they already have the full team needed to make the game. That leaves external investors – time consumming and in many ways even harder to pull off than getting publisher funding. Now is not a good time to be doing the start-up thing unless you already have finance in place.